Comment by metaphor
Not sure I follow. Are you suggesting farming pythons as a prospective solution?
Assuming this is the case (that would likely mitigate the mercury bioaccumulation hazard), it may be doable, but that would only make business development sense if an addressable market actually exists.
I say "may" because it's unclear what a notional python farmer would feed such a carnivore that's both cost-effective at scale and isn't a disease vector itself. Corn is the answer for chicken, pigs, and (unfortunately) cows. In Japan, farmed unagi are fed a highly nutritious semi-solid paste that's relatively expensive...but demand for unagi in Japan alone is absurdly high and priced accordingly, with cultural significance providing additional market support.
I imagine the incentive to create a market for python meat would be primarily driven as a way to combat its invasive status in Florida...to which consuming farmed python does nothing to address this underlying root environmental issue.
I agree that farming wouldn’t address the environmental issue. I was mentioning farming because you mentioned supply chains. Snakes are picky about what they eat, but they eat mice, and there are already live mice supply chains, so that is probably the cheapest way to feed them: just outsource it. I think that snakes are already farmed in other Gulf states where alligators are farmed, so I don’t think there’s room for much innovation here. It was just food for thought for you and others.
I don’t think that marketing the snake as a delicacy would do anything but increase the demand for the snakes. When incentives have been advertised and paid for invasive species in the past, breeders immediately started cashing in, so there are limits to how much nudging you can do, and how you can do it, or you will have rewarded bad behavior and perhaps created negative externalities that did not exist before.
I was trying to explore the idea of farming them and what would happen if consuming them became popular, which is likely farming them unless prohibited, which would probably be cheaper than catching them. If the wild ones are higher in mercury, then farmed ones might be worth less even though they are healthier, due to potential subsidies to promote eradicating them and charges due to it being a wild caught novelty menu item. This could create perverse incentives leading people to adulterate farmed pythons to pass them off as wild ones. I think the entire idea is fraught and isn’t as simple as a comment thread might make it seem, not that I think you are minimizing the issue. I just don’t know if any individual comment can do the issue justice, so it’s hard to explore the issue in bite size pieces.