Contractors with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Thomas Aycock, left, and Tom Rahill, founder of the Swamp Apes, a veterans therapy nonprofit, show off an invasive Burmese python caught earlier, as they wait for sunset to hunt pythons, Tuesday, Aug. 13, 2024, in the Florida Everglades. (AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee)

Florida scientists are using opossums to secretly track invasive Burmese pythons in the Everglades-and it's working.

Some of Florida’s opossums may soon start dying for a noble cause. A few select marsupials fitted with tracking collars may begin to lead scientists to invasive Burmese pythons (Python bivittatus) slithering through the Everglades.

Burmese pythons provide an integrative contamination signal across terrestrial–aquatic food webs, leveraging long lifespan, whole-prey ingestion, and trophic position to concentrate PFAS in tissues. HPLC–MS/MS profiling of 67 python livers for 30 PFAS found linear PFOS dominant (93% detection;