Hunters pulled four tons of python out of one corner of Florida in a single season

Biologists at the Conservancy of Southwest Florida closed out the most recent Burmese python breeding season with a haul of 177 snakes weighing a combined 8,080 pounds, the largest single-season total the nonprofit’s tracking program has ever recorded. The removal ran through the pythons’ November-to-April breeding window in a roughly 200-square-mile stretch of Collier County, and the nonprofit announced the final tally on June 9, once the season had wrapped.

The record season did not come from broad sweeps of the Everglades. It came from a narrower, more targeted method the Conservancy has refined since 2013: following a small number of radio-tagged male pythons to the much larger, harder-to-find females they mate with.

How scout snakes led biologists to the breeding females

The Conservancy’s own season report describes the program’s core tool as a group of 40 tagged male Burmese pythons, known internally as scout snakes, each carrying a radio transmitter. Because male pythons travel toward breeding females during mating season, trackers use the signal to follow a scout snake through the landscape until it leads them to a female, at which point the team intercepts and removes her before she can lay eggs. The first capture of the season, made through scout snake #118, nicknamed “Snaquan,” turned up a 17-foot, 148-pound female in November 2025. Later in the season, scout snake #93, “Fenrir,” led biologists to an even larger female: 17 feet long and 153 pounds, the biggest catch of the year.

Why the biomass, not just the snake count, matters

Averaged out, the female pythons removed this season weighed about 95 pounds each, but the emphasis on total weight over raw snake count reflects how reproduction scales with size in this species: larger females lay far more eggs. This season’s captures carried an average of 70 eggs apiece, and biologists pulled an additional 4,100 Burmese python eggs out of the ecosystem by intercepting gravid females before they could nest. A quarter of the removed females were found to contain the remains of white-tailed deer, evidence of how far up the local food chain the invasive predators have climbed in Southwest Florida.

A decade of data behind one record season

Ian Bartoszek, the Conservancy wildlife biologist who built the python program, said the scout-snake network let the team locate large breeding females deep in the landscape before they could reproduce, calling the season the program’s first four-ton removal total. Since the effort began in 2013, the Conservancy’s research and removal work has pulled 1,750 pythons weighing more than 53,000 pounds out of Southwest Florida, a dataset that has fed 25 collaborative scientific publications on Burmese python biology and behavior produced with partners including the U.S. Geological Survey, the University of Florida, Rookery Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve and the South Florida Water Management District.

What the Conservancy hopes a record year eventually means

Bartoszek framed the record haul as evidence that sustained, science-based removal is suppressing local python reproduction, and said the program’s goal is for these seasonal totals to decline over time as breeding pressure eases. Conservancy president and chief executive Rob Moher credited the removal effort with reducing pressure on native wildlife populations, arguing that without the ongoing work the invasive predators would continue reproducing largely unchecked across the region’s remaining wild landscape.

The Conservancy of Southwest Florida is a regional nonprofit that has operated in Collier, Lee, Charlotte, Hendry and Glades counties for more than 60 years, running programs in environmental science, policy, education and wildlife rehabilitation alongside the python work. Its Naples campus houses Collier County’s only native wildlife hospital, which treats animals injured or displaced by the same landscape pressures the python program is trying to relieve. The python research itself is one strand of that broader science division, funded separately from the wildlife hospital through a combination of private donations, grants, the Naples Zoo Conservation Fund and the Fish & Wildlife Foundation of Florida.

Where one nonprofit’s total sits inside Florida’s statewide effort

The Conservancy’s four-ton season is a single organization’s result from one corner of Collier County, not a statewide figure. Florida’s broader removal push runs through the state’s Python Action Team – Removing Invasive Constrictors program, known as PATRIC, which pays qualified contractors to remove nonnative constrictors from public lands statewide, working alongside the South Florida Water Management District’s separate Python Elimination Program. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission reports that, as of April 2025, more than 23,500 pythons have been removed from natural areas across the state since record-keeping began, with more than 11,000 of those credited to the PATRIC and Water Management District contractor programs since they launched in spring 2017. The Conservancy’s scout-snake network is a separate, narrower research effort that targets breeding females specifically rather than surveying for any python encountered, which is part of why its season total is reported in total biomass removed rather than simple headcount.

How residents can add to the count

The Conservancy’s removal program relies partly on public reporting to expand its reach beyond the radio-tagged scout network. Residents who spot a Burmese python in Collier County are asked to call a dedicated hotline between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., or 911 after hours, and to stay near the snake’s location, at a safe distance, until a wildlife responder arrives, since tips from the public can lead scout-snake trackers and staff to animals the radio network alone would miss.

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

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