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RE: Zoologists put GPS tags on possums and raccoons to find invasive pythons

in Popular STEMlast year

This is a really creative idea, but it seems to me that they're not going to find anywhere near enough snakes this way to control the population.

You have to tag the animal, hope it gets eaten by a snake, and then find the snake before the sensor stops working. My gut feeling is that it would take far too many people and too much money to reach the number of snakes that they need to reach for population control.

You mentioned this in the article,

However, zoologists admit that even the use of GPS tags is unlikely to completely destroy the population of invasive snakes.

but I just wanted to elaborate on that point.

Still, it is a very clever way to find the snakes for zoological study.

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Yeah, I thought so too. They won't be able to attach thousands of gps trackers to thousands of poor raccoons, It's simply not scalable.

However, the data can provide patterns, and that's some useful info to work with.

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