“Hurricane Andrew knocked them out of their beds and into the fields.”
Funny, but well said.
How I used to love visiting the Reptile House at the Miami Zoo before Hurricane Andrew hit!
From the article:
On August 23, 1992 Andrew made landfall south of Miami as a Category 5 hurricane, one of the most powerful ever to hit the United States. Sustained winds whipped at upwards of 150 miles per hour, more than enough to rip roofs off homes and demolish buildings, including a number of exotic wildlife facilities in the area. One of the buildings affected was a breeding facility for Burmese pythons, and many of them escaped.
“Thousands of specimens of exotics [sic] species escaped their caging and enclosures during the passing of the storm through south Dade County,” state environmental inspectors reported 10 days after the hurricane. “Witnesses spotted hundreds of large snakes and non-venomous snakes loose.”
Today the Everglades are overrun with the giant snakes and it’s had devastating consequences. A 2012 study by the U.S. Geological Survey found that after Andrew exacerbated the Burmese python invasion of the Florida Everglades, populations of raccoons and opossums dropped roughly 99 percent and some species of rabbits and foxes effectively disappeared. Species that had long flourished here were being decimated by the aggressive newcomers.