The Everglades used to have raccoons, opossums, bobcats, and rabbits – now it has Burmese pythons that have erased up to 99 percent of those populations.
Tom Rahill just walked in on two bad hips and fixed that better than anyone in history.
A 69-year-old veteran nonprofit founder from Lutz just shattered every record in the Florida Python Challenge’s 13-year history – and the $10,000 prize he won is already gone.
One Man vs. 906 Hunters: The Numbers Tell the Real Story
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission announced the 2026 Python Challenge results on August 5 in Panama City Beach.
Tom Rahill won the $10,000 Ultimate Grand Prize.
He caught 96 Burmese pythons in 10 days – all from Everglades National Park.
The other 906 registered participants combined caught 184.
His per-person removal rate was roughly 473 times the field average.
To understand that number: in 2024, the grand prize winner caught 20 pythons.
In 2025, Taylor Stanberry made history as the first woman to win the overall prize, setting a new record with 60.
Rahill’s 96 beats that record by 60 percent.
Stanberry came back in 2026, caught 34 – which would have won any prior year’s competition – and finished second among professionals.
This is not a story about effort or motivation.
Every one of those 906 other participants drove to South Florida, paid their $25 registration fee, completed the online training, and spent 10 days in heat and thunderstorms hunting snakes.
The gap between Rahill and the field is a detection gap.
Burmese pythons are ambush predators that spend most of their time hidden in burrows, thick vegetation, and shallow water.
Even trained herpetologists find them at roughly 1 percent efficacy in controlled conditions.
In a wild ecosystem spanning more than 1,000 square miles, the hunt is almost entirely a function of knowing the ground – where the snakes concentrate, which stretches of water they favor, which banks they return to.
Rahill has hunted professionally in Everglades National Park for over a decade.
He knows it the way a man knows his own yard.
His Doctors Told Him Not to Go and He Went Anyway
“My doctors were saying, ‘You can’t go out there,'” Rahill said. “I did go out there and I got the big snake for that person.”
That last part is the real story.
Rahill is the founder of Swamp Apes, a Florida nonprofit that brings military veterans and first responders into the Everglades to hunt invasive pythons as a form of conservation therapy.
The program channels the skills veterans already have – steadiness under physical punishment, the ability to move and wait and watch in brutal terrain – into work that actually matters for the natural world.
Rahill’s entire 2026 strategy was built around one mission objective: helping a military veteran catch a large python.
He partnered with a veteran during the competition, targeted a big female, and found one – a 17-footer that was not submitted as his official longest-python entry.
He caught 96 snakes and let the veteran have the one that would have won him another prize.
The $10,000 grand prize is going back into Swamp Apes.
He and his wife are celebrating their 45th wedding anniversary.
The Everglades Crisis That Makes Rahill’s Work Critical
The python problem started with irresponsible pet owners.
Burmese pythons arrived in South Florida in the late 1970s and 1980s as exotic pets – and when owners found them growing to 13 feet and beyond, many simply released them.
Hurricane Andrew in 1992 accelerated the catastrophe when it destroyed a python breeding facility and sent additional animals into the surrounding swampland.
With no natural predators capable of stopping them, the population exploded.
Road-survey data from 2003–2011 documented a 99.3 percent decrease in raccoon sightings, a 98.9 percent decline in opossum sightings, and an 87.5 percent decline in bobcat sightings across heavily infested areas of Everglades National Park.
Marsh rabbits, cottontail rabbits, and foxes effectively disappeared.
Conservative population estimates now place the number of Burmese pythons in Florida at 30,000 or more – some researchers put the figure closer to 300,000.
A female lays between 50 and 100 eggs at a time.
Florida’s professional removal program, PATRIC, has made genuine progress: 1,022 pythons pulled out in just three months from May through July 2025, compared to 343 in that same window a year earlier, after Governor DeSantis backed the effort with a $2 million state investment.
Full eradication is considered effectively impossible – the snakes are too well-hidden, the ecosystem too vast.
That is exactly why what Rahill does matters, and why he has been doing it since 2008.
https://twitter.com/positiveosceola/status/2085398192456176105?s=20
Every pregnant female removed from the Everglades eliminates a potential clutch of up to 100 eggs.
Rahill’s 96 snakes are not a statistic.
There are hundreds of pythons that will never be born in the Everglades, thousands of native animals that will not be consumed, and a piece of American wilderness with a better chance at coming back.
He did it fresh off double hip surgery, for a veteran he wanted to give a moment worth remembering.
That is what it looks like when someone actually cares about a mission.
Sources:
- Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, “2026 Florida Python Challenge Results,” FWC, August 5, 2026.
- Governor Ron DeSantis, “Governor Ron DeSantis Highlights Success of Everglades Python Removal Program,” FWC Press Release, October 21, 2025.
- Dorcas, M.E., et al., “Severe mammal declines coincide with proliferation of invasive Burmese pythons in Everglades National Park,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, February 2012.
- Sarah Funck, Program Coordinator, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, quoted via Tampa Bay News 10, August 6, 2026.
- FOX 13 Tampa Bay, “Florida Python Challenge 2026 winner: 96 snakes and $10K grand prize,” FOX 13, August 6, 2026.
