Cozumel and the Boas, Not a Good Thing!

Before heading to the NY Times travel show today I watched a show on the National Geographic Channel about snakes. I am terrified but fascinated by them. This story was just amazing though and I sat glued to the tube. Apparently the island of Cozumel is jam packed with boas! The snake hunting crew literally find then everywhere when driving the roads at night. Chicken are disappearing from their coops and the indigenous mammals and birds have no way of coping with the predator. The boas can hide deep within the coral deposits of the island and it is impossible to physically remove them.

I was tempted to go to the Mexican Tourism booth to inquire about the problem but didn’t want to cause an international scene. Hey I like heading south of the border! More amazing is just how the boas came to be on Cozumel. I found a link and pasted some of the story below:

Devil Snake of Cozumel
Cozumel is a beautiful island in the Caribbean close to the Mexican shore. On top of its touristic value it has an amazing diversity of endemic animals that do not occur anywhere else. Or it had!!. Back in the seventies a film crew came to Cozumel to make a film where they used the beautiful beaches of the island to represent the scene where a galleon has sunk and the film was about their survivors and their life after the wreck. As extras in the film the included some boa constrictors that were used basically for the purpose of showing that it was a jungle with jungle-like dangers. However, there was not boas originally in the island. The production crew brought a few from the main land and used them as the needed (for five seconds in the whole film) but when the film was finished, the turned them lose. http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/credits/index_S.html
http://pages.prodigy.net/anaconda/tv.htm