Image: The Everglades Foundation
How researchers fitted Burmese pythons with Global Positioning System tags in Everglades National Park
The research team, made up of Brian Smith, Kristen Hart, Frank Mazzotti, Mathieu Basille, and Christina Romagosa, fitted 13 Burmese pythons with Global Positioning System tags inside Everglades National Park. Every tag, whether on a python or a platform, was programmed to attempt a location fix every 90 minutes. Because large constricting snakes are top predators in their ecosystems and are often a management priority, whether their populations are threatened or invasive, yet nobody had proved this technology could deliver dependable data on them, the design mattered.
According to the United States Geological Survey publication of their work in the journal Animal Biotelemetry , the team also placed seven additional tags on stationary platforms. Those fixed tags served as a benchmark, revealing whether habitat itself, rather than snake behaviour, interfered with signal reception.
Tag failures and what the researchers recommend, pairing satellite tracking with radio telemetry
The study’s most sobering result involved hardware. Half of the recovered pythons were either missing their tag or carried a tag that had malfunctioned, so no data could be retrieved from those animals. Even so, the authors concluded that Global Positioning System biologging remains a promising tool for obtaining frequent, accurate, and precise locations of large constricting snakes. They recommend that future studies pair the tags with frequent, very high-frequency radio locations, which would reduce bias and limit the damage when a tag fails. They also call for improvements to tag design to make such failures less common. For conservation teams, park managers, and anyone funding python research, the message is practical, adopt the technology, but keep a backup method running alongside it.