Mike Dorcas was about 4 when he caught his first snake. It was under a rock behind his house in Bedford, Tex. He spent hours watching it slither, then set it loose.

At 8, he built a zoo with a green snake, a toad and his pet Chihuahua, Sissy, and charged his friends a nickel to see it.

When his grandparents took him to the zoo in nearby Fort Worth, he shunned the lions and giraffes for the reptile house.

So when it came time to pick a career in college, he chose herpetology (the study of amphibians and reptiles) - conducting snake research to complete his masters thesis and Ph.D dissertation.

"It's been a lifelong fascination that led to a career. I get paid to do what I did when I was 10," said Dorcas, 48, a Davidson College biology professor and the lead author of a study on Burmese pythons in the Florida Everglades.

In recent years, Dorcas and a former student, Davidson graduate J.D. Willson (now a post-graduate researcher at Virginia Tech), have collaborated on books on snakes. Their most recent, "Invasive Pythons in the United States," was published last year.

They are the two lead authors on the Everglades National Park study - which is bringing them widespread notoriety. Their study was conceived about two years ago, and incorporated data from field surveys that began in the 1990s, Dorcas said. Over the years, they found that as the population of pythons boomed, populations of animals such as raccoons, deer, opossum and rabbits fell precipitously.

"Rabbits and raccoons were the most abundant animals back in the 1990s and before," said Dorcas, a Davidson professor since 1998. "After a while, we didn't see one rabbit or raccoon driving the park road.

"When I came to Davidson, if you told me Burmese pythons would be populating in Everglades National Park and doing very well, I likely wouldn't have believed you."