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

Opossums are known to be one of snakes’ favorite prey, and now scientists in Florida are using them to their advantage. Scientists in the Everglades region have fitted the animal — along with raccoons — with GPS collars to track Burmese pythons after they swallow the animals whole.

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;