Florida biologists pulled 8,080 pounds of python out of the Everglades in one season

Biologists and volunteers with the Conservancy of Southwest Florida pulled 177 invasive Burmese pythons weighing a combined 8,080 pounds out of a 200-square-mile stretch of Collier County during the breeding season that ran from November 2025 through April 2026. It is the largest biomass the program has removed in a single season since it began tracking and hunting pythons in 2013, breaking the Conservancy’s own prior record. The snakes came out of habitat that connects directly to the Everglades ecosystem, where Burmese pythons have spent decades establishing themselves as one of the most damaging invasive predators in the state.

The season’s numbers work out to roughly four tons of python removed from a single stretch of South Florida landscape in six months, using tracking methods the Conservancy has refined since the program’s earliest years. Wildlife biologist and Conservancy science project manager Ian Bartoszek said the season represented the program’s first four-ton removal total, crediting radio-tagged “scout” male pythons with leading his team to large breeding females deep in the landscape before those females had a chance to lay their eggs.

How a Record Season Actually Gets Counted

The Conservancy’s removal figures come from an established research protocol rather than a one-time sweep: biologists implant radio transmitters in male pythons, then track those males during the winter and spring breeding season on the theory that a male will lead researchers straight to a much larger, harder-to-find female. That method is why the program can report precise totals like 177 snakes and 8,080 pounds rather than a rough estimate, since nearly every capture traces back to a tagged scout snake’s movements.

Since the program started in 2013, the Conservancy’s python research and removal effort has taken a cumulative 1,750 pythons weighing more than 53,000 pounds out of Southwest Florida, making this single season responsible for roughly a tenth of that entire eleven-year total.

Deer, Not Rabbits, Turning Up Inside the Females

The Conservancy’s season report found that a quarter of the female pythons examined contained the remains of white-tailed deer, a detail that illustrates how far up the food chain the species has moved since it first established itself in South Florida. The same females carried an average of 70 eggs each, meaning every deer-eating female removed before the spring hatch represents dozens of pythons that never entered the population.

Deer are a keystone prey species for the Florida panther and other native predators, so a python population large enough to routinely consume them competes directly with wildlife the state has spent decades trying to protect through entirely separate conservation programs.

The scale of that competition is documented well beyond this single season. A road-survey study covering 2003 through 2011, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and summarized by the U.S. Geological Survey, recorded a 99.3 percent drop in raccoon sightings and a 98.9 percent drop in opossum sightings along Everglades-area roads compared with counts from the late 1990s, with rabbits effectively disappearing from the survey routes entirely. Bobcat sightings fell 87.5 percent over the same period, the smallest decline of the group but still severe enough to implicate pythons as the primary driver.

The Conservancy’s program is one of several python-control efforts now operating across South Florida, alongside the state’s separate annual Florida Python Challenge, which recruits members of the public to hunt and remove snakes over a competition period each summer. The Conservancy’s year-round, radio-telemetry-driven approach differs from that public hunt in one key respect: because it tracks specific male snakes continuously rather than relying on open searching, it disproportionately finds the large, egg-laying females that a public hunt is less likely to encounter by chance.

The Largest Snake of the Season

The biggest capture of the season was a female weighing 153 pounds and measuring 17 feet long, caught within the same Collier County study area that produced the rest of the season’s total. Reporting on the record season notes that individual pythons of that size are now uncommon enough to be treated as a season highlight rather than a routine find, even in a program that has spent more than a decade specifically targeting the largest breeding females it can locate.

Scout Snakes and the Science Behind the Removal

Bartoszek also said the program’s science-based management approach is suppressing local python reproduction, and that continued removal pressure could bring the numbers down over time rather than up, a shift from the trajectory the population followed in the program’s earliest seasons. The scout-snake method itself grew directly out of the Conservancy’s own radio-telemetry research into how Burmese pythons move and breed across the Southwest Florida landscape.

Whether an eleventh consecutive season sets a new record again next spring will depend on whether the tagged males currently roaming Collier County lead biologists to even more breeding females than the 177 pythons removed this year, or whether more than a decade of sustained pressure finally starts pulling the total down.

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This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.