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Releasing a giant 16-foot, 150-pound Burmese python back into the Florida Everglades sounds like a terrible idea. The state has long fought a grueling battle against these invasive predators, and officials have long relied on capturing and removing the enormous reptiles one at a time. Recently, though, wildlife researchers snagged one of these pythons, slapped a tracker on it, and intentionally let it slither right back into the swamp.

No, this isn't the concept for a giant monster movie (although those are great). Really, it's a calculated move within this ongoing battle, and a tech-driven Trojan horse that scientists are betting on big. Why? Because Burmese pythons are notoriously tricky to find in the wild, and for the researchers trying to track their nesting and breeding patterns, that ups the difficulty level to nearly impossible. Beyond that, tracking them on foot is slow and expensive, as the reptiles are easily camouflaged in the Everglades' dense marshland.…