Burmese python numbers in the Florida Everglades have declined significantly. Governor Ron DeSantis attributed this decline to a partnership with a Miami-based company that manufactures clothing and accessories from python leather. Invasive pythons have caused extensive damage to the South Florida ecosystem, and experts say the snakes continue to expand their range northward.
For forty years, the giant Burmese python had no natural predators or competitors in Florida. The species originally comes from Southeast Asia, arriving in Florida through the exotic pet trade in the 1970s and 1980s. Some owners released snakes that grew too large. Hurricane Andrew in 1992 also destroyed breeding facilities, releasing an unknown number of snakes into the wetlands overnight.
The Burmese python proved biologically suited to the Everglades. Adults can exceed 18 feet in length. Their spotted brown pattern blends almost perfectly with fallen leaves and forest shadows, making them nearly invisible. Trackers have stood within a few feet of large snakes without seeing them. The animals can remain motionless for days or weeks while waiting for prey.
The snakes’ true advantage, however, was not their size or camouflage. Native animals in the Everglades carry no evolved fear of the Burmese python. Species such as marsh rabbits, raccoons, opossums, and wading birds have no instinctive recognition of this predator. They do not flee or hide because their evolutionary memory does not include it.
The results were severe. Long-term road surveys comparing periods before and after python establishment showed dramatic declines. Raccoon sightings dropped by as much as 99 percent, opossums by similar margins, and bobcats by almost 90 percent. In one study, marsh rabbits disappeared from their release area within a year. Researchers have found dozens of mammal and bird species inside python stomachs.
The Everglades functions as the largest natural water purification system in the country, serving millions of people in South Florida. The system depends on the interconnection of its parts. Removing mammals from the base of this network risks a gradual breakdown rather than a sudden collapse.
Florida has responded with removal programs. The state coordinates paid contractors who enter the swamp specifically to find and remove pythons. Wildlife agencies have removed thousands of snakes in recent years. One notable tool is the “scout snake” method, sometimes called the Judas snake approach. Biologists capture a male python, attach a radio transmitter, and release it during mating season. The male searches for females, and biologists follow the signal to remove the female and her potential offspring.
The state also runs the annual Florida Python Challenge, turning python hunting into a sanctioned competition that draws hundreds of participants over ten days. In partnership with Inversa, a Miami-based company, the state has reportedly tripled removal numbers. Tracking dogs have been trained, and hunters work levees at night with flashlights and bare hands.
Despite these efforts, python populations have shown little real sign of sustained decline. The biology of the species works against human removal efforts. A single female can lay roughly 100 eggs in one season. One surviving nest can offset many removals.
In a few specific areas within Big Cypress National Preserve, however, survey data began to show something unusual. Python detection rates declined slightly in certain locations over successive seasons, while all surrounding indicators continued upward. Researchers ruled out new hunting programs, weather events, disease, and other conventional explanations.
The answer came from motion-sensor cameras in the Big Cypress National Preserve. In June 2021, published camera images captured a bobcat standing at the edge of a python nest. This was notable because bobcat numbers had fallen by nearly 90 percent in python-affected areas. A bobcat typically weighs 20 to 30 pounds and usually avoids large constrictor snakes. The female python guarding the nest outweighed the bobcat several times over.
The cameras recorded the bobcat returning over several days. While the snake was absent, the bobcat approached the unguarded nest, ate eggs, trampled others, and dug into the nest. When the python returned and assumed a defensive posture, the bobcat did not simply flee. The cameras documented a confrontation. When biologists later recovered the remaining eggs and attempted to incubate them in a lab, almost none developed. The bobcat had effectively eliminated that generation of pythons.
Wildlife biologists described the finding as a genuine sign of hope. A native animal had begun to push back against an invasive species that had faced no resistance for forty years.
The observation raised the question of how the bobcat learned this behavior. The python has existed in large numbers in Florida for only a few decades, too short a period for evolutionary adaptation. There is no genetic blueprint telling a Florida bobcat that an unguarded python nest is a food source. The behavior appears instead to come from individual experience and observation.
Researchers who study animal intelligence note that some behaviors spread through learning and imitation rather than genetics, a phenomenon called cultural transmission. Crows learn to drop hard nuts on roads. Killer whale groups pass specialized hunting techniques to their young. Chimpanzees share tool-use methods. In this case, the documented evidence is more limited: native predators appear to be recognizing the Burmese python as a new food source and learning to exploit moments when the snake is vulnerable.
In 2025, researchers documented a bobcat in the Everglades linked to the death of a python more than twice its size. The python weighed about 50 pounds, and the bobcat weighed about 25 pounds. A biologist who had studied these animals for years described the case with a mixture of amazement and satisfaction, noting that a native animal had killed a major predator.
Various other native species also kill pythons under certain conditions. Cold snaps kill snakes caught in the open. Alligators prey on pythons, especially smaller ones. Black bears have been linked to destroyed male tracker snakes. Birds of prey take juveniles. The swamp has multiple ways of killing pythons. None of these were enough to reverse the invasion on their own, but they signal that the ecosystem is beginning to respond.
There are periods when a python is unusually vulnerable. After a large meal, a python’s metabolism rises sharply, and its organs expand to handle digestion. For days afterward, the snake is heavy, slow, and committed to remaining in one place. A female python brooding eggs wraps her body around them and shivers to generate heat, staying fixed in one position for weeks. During shedding, a python’s eyes become milky blue, and it is temporarily nearly blind, relying on smell and vibration alone.
These windows do not make pythons easy prey, but they open partial opportunities. A 25-pound bobcat, a bird, or a bear can exploit an advantage that would not exist against a healthy, alert, well-fed snake.
The bobcat is not the only native species involved. Alligators, as original heavyweight predators of the wetlands, will strike at snakes when the opportunity arises. Black bears have left evidence of killing pythons during cold periods when the snakes were too sluggish to resist. Wading birds and birds of prey take small pythons, meaning the snakes must survive a gauntlet of beaks and claws before reaching safer adult sizes. Eggs are raided, juveniles are hunted, and now adults are occasionally brought down by a predator that was once considered prey.
For four decades, the adult Burmese python was effectively safe in the Everglades, free to grow and lay hundreds of eggs with nothing in the ecosystem capable of interrupting that cycle. That is no longer entirely true.
Some native species have not adapted in this way. Otters, for example, have been severely affected by the python invasion, with their numbers declining rather than rising. Coyotes, which have maintained or slightly increased their numbers in some survey areas, were examined as a possible cause of mammal declines but were largely ruled out.
The story does not involve coordinated animal resistance. There is no plan among the cats, birds, bears, and alligators. Instead, an ecosystem that has suffered for forty years is beginning, in scattered and uncoordinated ways, to recognize the intruder as a food source, a vulnerability, and an opportunity. The solutions accumulate quietly.
The reduction in python detection rates in those specific areas of Big Cypress likely reflects this shift. The explanation is not that humans have suddenly become more efficient, nor the weather, nor a convenient disease. It is that native predators are learning, in some regions, how to fight back. Where this pressure is real, the steady upward python curve can finally bend downward, not because of a single heroic animal, but because the network the python invaded has begun to push back.
The invasion has not been reversed. Estimates still place Burmese python numbers in South Florida in the tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands. Their reproductive capacity remains undiminished. Many females live in remote areas that humans never reach. The areas showing decline represent only a fraction of the overall range.
Human removal programs remain necessary and must continue. But something has fundamentally shifted. For the first time in four decades, the ecosystem is not simply absorbing damage. It is showing resistance. Animals without budgets, strategy meetings, or press releases are accomplishing, in their scattered way, what forty years of organized human effort alone could not.
This raises a question that extends beyond Florida and beyond pythons. Conservation programs have spent decades counting what can be removed and building programs around what can be displayed. The more important story may be unfolding in trail-camera footage no one examined, in the small downward tick in the data that is easy to ignore as noise, and in the patient adaptation of a bobcat that refused to remain prey.
