While even the most dire warnings for global warming won’t fully rid America of Florida, the explosion in the burmese python population may ensure that the state is soon uninhabitable. The giant snake apocalypse is already underway in the animal kingdom, with raccoon, opossum, deer, and bobcat populations down anywhere from 87% to 99% between 1996 and 2011. Global warming and the complete lack of effective predators will accelerate the python apocalypse, with one study predicting a burmese python expansion that will swallow the entire half of the southern United States, eventually reaching as far north as Washington D.C. (a subsequent study has disputed this). Despite all of the post-apocalyptic shows, movies, and Y.A. novels, it seems that our dooms may be sealed by an entirely unexpected and outlandish invasion of giant killer snakes.

Python Wrestles Gator for Opportunity to Overthrow Humanity

While sightings began in the 1980’s, it wasn’t until 2000 that Florida began to officially recognize the ecosystem damage caused by the burmese pythons. Now a new study suggests that the giant snake threat is even worse than believed. “Marsh rabbit mortalities tie pythons to precipitous decline of mammals in the Everglades” tied radio transmitters to marsh rabbits, waited for them to get eaten, then sought out “visual confirmation that the transmitter was inside a snake or alligator.” In the two areas where marsh rabbits were released pythons ate 50% and 78% of all the marsh rabbits released. That disastrous level of predation “shocked” the researchers. Co-author Bob Reed told CBS News “rabbit populations are supposed to be regulated by factors other than predation, like drought, disease.” That’s right, pythons are a rabbit natural disaster.

While importation of burmese pythons was banned in 2012, it’s far too late to stop the giant snakes from attaining a stable breeding population. Nobody is even sure how many pythons are to be found in Florida; estimates range from 30,000 to more than 300,000 (more than enough to pack Disney World six times over).

There seems to be no way to kill the burmese pythons in Florida. Dogs and state search teams have proven woefully ineffective. Bloodthirsty Floridians are overwhelmingly in support of a bounty, but a month-long event with cash bounties held by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission turned up only 68 pythons despite having 1,600 participants and searching over a million acres of swamp. While bio-controls like viruses have been proposed, the risk of it spreading to alligator populations, or creating a worldwide Dawn of the Planet of Apes But With Pythons This Time are just too great.

Python Apocalypse: The Terms of Ensnakement

While Florida has become immune to hurricanes, the combination of global warming and burmese pythons has created its own perfect storm that will swamp Florida and the southern states in giant snakes. A paper from the U.S. Geological Survey’s Invasive Species Science Branch found that by 2100 the burmese python populations could spread to 16 Southern states:

Our descendants will be forced to recreate the Civil War, this time fighting against the burmese python confederation instead of slavers.

While there’s little doubt that snakes will soon be eating American children, it remains to be seen whether they’ll evolve the brain capacity, systems of governance, and military necessary to spell an end to our global warming regime.