The snakes have at times been so abundant that they caused power outages by crawling on electrical equipment, he said.
This signals the need for investment controlling global transport of invasive species to avoid paying for mitigation after the invasions occur, said Soto, a PhD student at the University of South Bohemia in the Czech Republic, the study's lead researcher.
"Nowadays, the pet trade is the main pathway for these species, especially now that everyone wants to get the most exotic snake," Soto told Reuters. "We propose continuously updating the black list of forbidden species for trade."
The figures were by derived by aggregating costs associated with invasive species as described in peer-reviewed literature or studies deemed of high reliability, and predominantly came from estimates and extrapolations rather than empirical observations.
