Indirect effects of invasive Burmese pythons on ecosystems in southern Florida

Invasive predators can dramatically alter ecosystems through both direct predation and indirect effects such as tropic cascades. However, most examples of top-down effects of invasive predators in terrestrial systems stem from islands or similar low-diversity ecosystems. Snakes are an emerging guild of damaging invasive predators, but demonstration of ecosystem-level impacts of invasive snakes are limited to the single case of the brown treesnake on Guam.
Invasive Burmese pythons are firmly established in southern Florida and have been linked to severe (80–100%) declines of several previously common mammal species (e.g. raccoons, opossums and rabbits). Specifically, spatiotemporal patterns of mammal declines in the Everglades mirror the spread of pythons and experimental reintroductions of rabbits to areas where they had been extirpated failed due to high (77% of mortalities) rates of predation by pythons.
I evaluated the potential indirect effects of pythons on the nesting success of...