Invasive pythons have set up a new stronghold far outside the Everglades

For decades, the story of Florida’s invasive Burmese pythons has been a story about the Everglades, where the giant constrictors have hollowed out populations of native mammals across millions of acres of wetland. Now state wildlife officials say the snakes have established a second breeding foothold well beyond that range, on the opposite side of the peninsula along Florida’s Gulf Coast. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has confirmed that pythons are “established” in part of western Charlotte County, a designation that means the animals are reproducing in the wild rather than simply turning up as strays.

The finding matters because it suggests the invasion is no longer contained to a single region of southern Florida. A separate, self-sustaining population roughly a hundred miles northwest of the traditional stronghold gives the species a new base from which to spread, and it raises the prospect that the ecological damage documented in the Everglades could be repeated in a fresh landscape. Officials have responded by putting dedicated crews into the area to hunt and remove the snakes.

What “established” means in western Charlotte County

According to reporting on the agency’s announcement, the FWC has documented more than 60 credible python sightings in western Charlotte County since 2015, with the reports clustered around the communities of Rotonda West, Placida, Englewood East and South Gulf Cove. More than half of those reports have come since 2024, a sharp acceleration that helped push the agency to formally classify the population as established. The confirmation of the new colony marks the first time officials have applied that label to a python population outside the greater Everglades system.

The distinction between a stray animal and an established population is central to how wildlife managers respond. Escaped or released pets have been found in scattered locations across Florida for years, but a colony that is breeding and producing hatchlings represents a permanent presence unless it is aggressively suppressed. State biologists have said there is no indication the Charlotte County snakes migrated on their own from the south Florida population, and they suspect the colony began with captive animals that were released or escaped and then reproduced.

Why the Cape Haze area is vulnerable

The geography of the region works in the snakes’ favor. The affected area sits near the Cape Haze Peninsula, a low-lying coastal zone laced with an extensive network of natural and artificial waterways. Burmese pythons are strong swimmers and semi-aquatic, and canals can act as travel corridors that let them move between neighborhoods, preserves and undeveloped land without ever leaving the water. The area is also connected to major regional rivers, including the Peace, Myakka and Caloosahatchee, which could give an expanding population natural highways to push farther inland and along the coast.

That combination of dense canal systems and warm, prey-rich habitat mirrors the conditions that allowed pythons to flourish in the Everglades. The FWC’s species profile describes the Burmese python as one of the largest snakes in the world, capable of exceeding 18 feet, and notes that the reptiles are formidable predators with few natural enemies once they reach adult size in Florida. A landscape with abundant water, cover and food offers little to stop them.

The ecological stakes of a second front

In the Everglades, the consequences of the python invasion have been severe and well documented. Researchers have linked the snakes’ spread to dramatic declines in raccoons, opossums, rabbits, bobcats and other mid-sized mammals, with some surveys finding near-total disappearances of certain species in the areas most heavily colonized. As apex predators with enormous appetites, pythons compete with and consume native wildlife across the food web, and their impact ripples outward to the birds, reptiles and plants that depend on those animals.

A new breeding population on the Gulf Coast introduces the possibility of that same cascade in a region with its own sensitive habitats and species. It also complicates the broader effort to control the invasion, because resources that have been concentrated in the south now have to be stretched to cover a second, geographically distinct problem. Containing a population early, before it becomes as entrenched as the Everglades colony, is far easier than trying to claw it back after it has spread across a wide area.

How Florida is fighting back

The state’s response in Charlotte County began before the formal “established” designation. Beginning in 2024, the agency’s nonnative wildlife program deployed part-time python technicians to survey the highest-report areas and remove snakes on a recurring schedule, aiming to knock down the local population while it is still relatively small. That surveillance-and-removal approach is meant to slow reproduction and gather better data on how far the colony extends.

Those efforts sit alongside Florida’s long-running statewide campaign against the species. The FWC encourages the public to capture and humanely kill pythons on private land at any time with the landowner’s permission and without a permit, and it allows removal year-round on dozens of commission-managed properties. The state also runs contracted removal teams and the high-profile annual Florida Python Challenge, a timed competition that draws hundreds of participants and has removed thousands of snakes over the years. Wildlife managers have generally cast these programs less as a path to eradication — a goal most scientists consider unrealistic for the Everglades population — and more as a way to suppress numbers, protect specific areas and limit further spread. In Charlotte County, the hope is that acting while the colony is young offers a better chance of keeping it from becoming the peninsula’s second permanent python stronghold.

This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by Morning Overview editors.

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