For a crayfish in the Florida Everglades, its worst nightmare is three feet long, dark brown and pure muscle, with a mouth like a vacuum that sucks up nearly everything it can find — tiny fish, small shellfish, turtle eggs and frogs.
It’s called the Asian swamp eel. And while Floridians may be more used to seeing it grilled and doused in a sweet sticky sauce in sushi rolls, the slippery beasts have become an increasingly problematic invasive species in the delicate Everglades ecosystem.
While these eels have been a presence in certain pockets of the park for decades, a newly released paper published in the journal Science of the Total Environment has — for the first time — put some hard numbers on the voracious appetite of these creatures. And it isn’t pretty.
