The backbone with no backbone and missing link:

Gars, bowfin, stingrays, sturgeon, and paddlefish are all prehistoric fish that live in the Mississippi River. Florida has all of these fish accept the paddlefish as a natural part of it's ecosystem. It is unclear as to why the paddlefish is not here now. Fossil records have no way of finding a fish that has no bones unless the fish was preserved within a clay substrata like the soil found up north. It could have something to do with the way a relatively young Florida was formed. I would think that the teeth have something to do with the survival rate since it seems the fish with the most teeth win. There is more of a population of gar fish than bowfins, there are more bowfins than stingrays, more stingrays than sturgeon. In the scheme of nature the paddlefish was probably here in Florida long before the alligator and the alligator probably won.

After God made the Garden of Eden he made the paddlefish. This fish is the most energy efficient animal known to man, for a fish, it has the most advanced immune system, and sensory devices on the face of the earth. So much for the theory of evolution. Yes, predator and prey go hand in hand in nature. You can't have one without the other to keep nature in balance. In this respect then the paddlefish deserves our care and nurturing in the Florida wilds.

Snake Problem: The alligators will win almost every time because they have the biggest teeth. I am not sure where the 30 thousand jumbo snakes fit in. The large snakes in Florida Everglades are a big problem and some of them can eat alligators. Maybe they will eat 100 pound paddlefish, be to slow to move, and then get eaten by alligators. One thing is for certain, that the wild food source for these snakes would be increased, thereby keeping them in the wild, and not in my back yard. There seems to be the idea that these Pythons will eventually spread to the northern states. I would say that I am not a snake expert but the males will follow the females and the females will follow the food. If you set up a caged facility for the large females that you can catch and feed them paddlefish then the problem will take care of it's self. With the alligators well fed on paddlefish then the natural food supply (fish and game) will multiply, thereby causing the snakes to stay in that area. A few traps and the males are homeless. I would enjoy a good snake hunt but I don't want to go to Georgia to do it.

A once prolific fish like the paddlefish was destroyed by man when he made his dams on the rivers but it was probably destroyed first by alligators when they became over populated. Most certainly the paddlefish was here millions of years before the alligator and may in fact be the missing link to a truly healthy environment. Like a living energy source, the food energy loss within a pyramid of productivity is the smallest that nature has to offer, with almost a direct transfer from sun light to alligator. I have never believed the myth that a top predator like an alligator was over harvested by greedy trappers, da. They probably starved to death or ate each other when all of the food animals were used up.

These early ancestors of the dinosaur have a herding mentality, an army of giant algae eaters, going from south to north in the spring, and north to south in the winter. This large grouping would make them easy pickings for the alligators in Okeechobee and establishes them as probably the very first Florida tourist.

One excellent advantage is that nobody can prove in a court of law that the paddlefish is here or was here in south Florida before the discovery of America. With no fossil record and no Indian record then it will remain as a nonnative species to Florida. As a nonnative fish farm product, then it is not subject to CITES here in Florida accept as an export item. There are paddlefish in the wild in Alabama but none in south Florida.