Pythons have become a major problem in Florida where one suffocated a sleeping baby to death in her crib and thousands others prowl the Everglades, and nearby towns, threatening endangered species and pets alike.

One python was found in Everglades National Park with a half-swallowed alligator protruding from its mouth.

But it took a 9-foot Burmese python, illegally kept as a pet, strangling to death 2-year-old Shaiunna Hare in her crib near Orlando to cause an outcry to do something about the growing problem of pythons.

Florida Sen. Bill Nelson used the 17-foot long skin of a python killed in the Everglades as an exhibit as he testified in a Senate panel hearing Wednesday. He also offered the gruesome details of Hare's strangulation by a python that first bit the child on her face as she slept.

He warned other lawmakers that pythons were not only threatening rare species in the Everglades, along with even the alligators there, but that the reptiles would eventually attack a tourist.

Nelson, and others, are calling for action to ban the importation of pythons and measures to eradicate them from the Everglades.

An estimated 150,000 pythons live in the Everglades. Many of them were pets their owners no longer wanted and released there, while others descended from unwanted pets.

Everglades officials have documented numerous cases of pythons killing and eating adult deer and alligators. They are also a threat to other wildlife, along with livestock and dogs and cats in nearby communities to which the snakes have migrated.