I realise this thread has moved well off this topic, but this caught my eye and, in my opinion, is a gross oversimplification:
To me this is a personally motivated program guided by arrogance, his talks are very focussed on what HE has done, how HE has done it, and what HE is going to do for the world.
The internet is a wonderful place, where people can anonymously criticise others they've never met or know little about. If anyone thinks Gavin is working on the Oenpelli pythons out of greed and arrogance they should ask him about his personal expenses and the cost of the project so far, think about what he could possibly net should the project succeed and then do the maths. You'll probably find that setting up a lemonade stand at the end of the street with the local kids would be a much faster track to personal wealth. Even if successful, these python projects (whether it's morphs or an uncommon, wild type) are a bit like a pyramid scheme, or perhaps an even better comparison would be when ostrich breeding was all of the rage a number of years ago. They were going to be THE meat and leather animal of choice, so pairs were going for tens of thousands of dollars. Within a small number of ostrich generations, farmers couldn't give them away.
Rough-scaled pythons, once so rare they were known from only a single, hacked up, preserved specimen in a jar, went for $24K a pair when first bred but now, a few short years later, can be had for a couple of hundred dollars each. Would you go looking for a wild one now, to take home for your collection, given the costs of flying in and out of the Mitchell Plateau? I would think not.
What Gavin is aiming to do is what John Weigel did with the rough-scaled python - get them common enough in captivity that no one would even dream of looking for them in the wild to collect. Yes, I'm aware they're hard to find, but I know of a few people (fortunately all of the mind-set that they wouldn't consider taking them home) who have found them within the boundaries of Kakadu National Park. What none of us knows about (well, some of you may, if you have dodgier connections) is the number of people that have stumbled across them who have been inclined to take them home. I know a couple of 'friends of friends' that wouldn't hesitate.
A lot of animal species (not just reptiles, not just animals affected by the cane toad invasion and certainly not just Oenpelli pythons) are disappearing from the wild in the Northern Territory. Although captive breeding in the private trade is not the ideal conservation tool, especially given the current trend towards morphs and mutations, if they do disappear from the wild I'll take some comfort from knowing that a few thousand are still floating around the country in private collections.
