It’s pretty unfair that out of all our fauna, Australia doesn’t have a penis snake in its ecosystems.
So if we’re being technical, the penis snake does indeed have a scientific name – caecilians. It’s a limbless and vermiform amphibian that mostly live hidden in the ground and in-stream substrates.
Huh. Sounds almost like a penis except for the ‘hidden’ part.
They are a part of the amphibian family, but this particular species has made itself known in Florida.
Following a random discovery made a few years ago, a survey found that one particular caecilian potentially dragged its way to permanent residency in the United States for the first time. Huh. Sounds like a fuckboi entering my life.
DNA analyses and specimens demonstrate that this non-native amphibian set up house in a canal in the southern American state.
This of course makes sense – caecilians’ habitat also consists of shallow water and are native to wet, humid and tropical climates like Central and South America, environments that are similar to steamy Florida.
Specifically, they are native to drainage basins of the Cauca and Magdalena Rivers in Colombia and the Maracaibo Basin in Venezuela.
Florida was too much for the penis snake. pic.twitter.com/0IQ6PJYQcl
— FULLY Vaxxed Rhino 💉💉 (@VicedRhino) August 4, 2021
This particular breed of penile snake in Florida is called Typhlonectes natans.
According to Reptiles & Amphibians, it’s still too early to know if the penis snake has successfully established a wild population.
The conditions in their adopted Florida prove to be a good fit for the moisture thriving animals. Okay new theory: man actually evolved from the penis snake.
The species is almost entirely blind and some species’ loss of vision has even evolved with skin growing over the eyes after being a creature of the underground.
This has adapted them to be great diggers. Is this where ‘one-eyed trouser snake’ originates?
But…how did it get to Florida though? Suspicions concerning its arrival were first speculated in 2019 during a routine survey conducted by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission in Miami’s Tamiami Canal.
It was then taken as an ‘invasive’ species but failed to feed in captivity and died. Since then, there have been numerous reports of sightings with the specimens being given to the FFWC from the same canal it was discovered from in Miami.
Wait – it gets even weirder. The penis snake is apparently easily accessible in the U.S pet trade.
It stands to reason that these peculiar animals made their way into Florida’s waterways as an escapee or abandoned pet.
Whether its release was purposeful or not, it accumulates to the lengthy list of invasive and exotic animals that have made Florida their crib.
Examples of this include green iguanas which are now so abundant in Florida that when the temperature decreases in cooler months Floridians prepare themselves for the ‘iguana fall’.
Burmese are so pervasive that the government is apparently considering encouraging the public to expand their culinary skills and eat them to decrease python numbers.
I guess roadkill is ever-expanding. To this day there is allegedly a wild popular of Vervet monkeys (native to Africa) that broke free from a farm in the region back in 1948.
What a wild, wild world we live in.
No worries — It’ll be right at home with all the native, but much, much tinier penis snake species: de Santis, Gaetz, Rubio, Scott, and Trump.
The ‘penis snake’ is Florida’s latest invasive species https://t.co/XHbpQ42gBH
— David Spector (@dhmspector) August 2, 2021
