Pythons keep spreading across Florida, and one county alone pulled out four tons of them

The Burmese python has become the defining ecological problem of the Florida Everglades, a giant constrictor from Southeast Asia that has established a self-sustaining wild population across the southern tip of the state. The scale of the invasion is hard to grasp until it is weighed. In a single recent season, a removal program working in just one county hauled out roughly four tons of the snakes — a record catch that offers both a measure of how many pythons are out there and a sobering hint of how many remain.

These are not animals that belong anywhere in North America. Descended from released or escaped pets, the pythons have spread through the marshes and tree islands of South Florida with almost no natural predators to check them. They grow long, breed prolifically, and eat nearly any warm-blooded animal they can overpower, which has made them a driving force behind a quiet collapse of native wildlife across a vast stretch of protected wetland.

Four tons of snakes from Collier County in a single season

The record haul came from the work of the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, whose team concentrated its efforts in Collier County, on the western edge of the Everglades roughly 90 miles from Miami. Over the course of the season the group removed 177 pythons weighing a combined 8,080 pounds — just over four U.S. tons — from an area of about 200 square miles. The organization described the effort as its largest single-season python removal since the program began in 2013.

The individual animals recovered underscore how formidable the species has become. The biggest female captured during the season stretched 17 feet and weighed 153 pounds, the kind of dimensions that let a python take down prey as large as a deer or an alligator. Just as significant as the snakes themselves were the eggs: the team also removed more than 4,100 python eggs before they could hatch, cutting off a future generation that would otherwise have swelled the population still further. Local coverage documented the record-breaking 8,080 pounds pulled from the region during the 2025-26 season.

Scout snakes and the science of finding a hidden predator

Catching pythons is extraordinarily difficult precisely because they are so well camouflaged. Their mottled skin blends almost perfectly into the sawgrass and leaf litter, and searchers can walk within a few feet of a large snake without seeing it. To overcome that, the removal program relies on a technique built around what handlers call scout snakes — male pythons that have been surgically implanted with radio transmitters and released back into the wild.

During the breeding season, those tagged males seek out females, and researchers simply follow the radio signal to find them. The approach turns the snakes’ own biology into a tracking tool, leading teams to the large, egg-bearing females that do the most reproductive damage. The Conservancy’s team tracked about 40 of these tagged scout snakes to locate breeding aggregations, a method refined through years of field research and detailed in reporting on the record python removal in Florida. It is painstaking, technology-dependent work, and even at its most effective it captures only a fraction of the total population.

How the pythons are hollowing out the Everglades food web

The reason so much effort goes into removal is that the ecological cost of inaction is severe. The U.S. Geological Survey, which studies the invasion through its wetland and aquatic research center, has linked the spread of Burmese pythons to dramatic declines in the mammals of Everglades National Park. In the areas where pythons are most established, sightings of raccoons, opossums, bobcats, and rabbits have plummeted since the late 1990s, in some cases falling by more than 90 percent.

That kind of loss ripples outward. When a top predator with no natural enemies removes the small and mid-sized mammals from an ecosystem, the effects cascade through the food web, altering everything from bird populations to the plants that depend on those animals for seed dispersal. The pythons have, in effect, inserted themselves at the apex of a system that never evolved to accommodate them, and the native wildlife has no defense.

Why removal helps but cannot end the invasion

For all the success of a record season, biologists are candid that hauling out four tons of snakes does not solve the underlying problem. The pythons are now too numerous and too widely dispersed across too much inaccessible terrain for any realistic capture effort to eliminate them. Females can lay dozens of eggs at a time, and the animals occupy flooded, roadless wilderness where systematic searching is nearly impossible.

What removal can do is slow the spread, protect pockets of native wildlife, and buy time for researchers to develop better tools — from improved detection methods to studies of the snakes’ movement and reproduction that make each patrol more efficient. Managers increasingly frame the goal not as eradication but as suppression, holding the population down at the invasion’s leading edges to keep it from expanding into new regions of Florida.

The record catch, then, is best read two ways at once. It is a genuine achievement, the product of years of scientific refinement and hard field labor. It is also a warning: if a single county can yield four tons of pythons in one season and the animals keep coming, the true size of the population lurking in the Everglades is larger than any tally of captured snakes will ever fully reveal.

This article was researched and written with the assistance of AI and reviewed by an editor prior to publication.

More from Morning Overview