Last year one man caught 60 pythons in 10 days and won $10,000.
This Thursday, the Everglades opens again – and the snakes don't know what's coming.
Florida is paying Americans to wade into the swamps and kill as many Burmese pythons as possible, and you can still sign up.
What Decades of Government Failure Did to America's Most Famous Wetland
This isn't a quirky Florida story.
It's a conservation catastrophe that took 50 years to reach a crisis point.
Burmese pythons entered the Everglades through the pet trade in the late 1970s.
Irresponsible owners bought them, realized a 13-foot snake wasn't a house pet, and dumped them in the wild.
Hurricane Andrew made it worse in 1992, allegedly destroying a facility holding captive pythons and releasing hundreds more into the sawgrass.
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With no natural predators and a food supply that had never encountered a constrictor, they exploded.
The U.S. Geological Survey tracked what happened next.
Raccoon populations dropped 99.3 percent since 1997.
Opossums fell 98.9 percent.
Bobcats – 87.5 percent.
Marsh rabbits, cottontail rabbits, and foxes effectively disappeared entirely.
A single 13-foot python can work through one raccoon, one opossum, six little blue herons, eight ibises, and dozens of smaller animals.
There are now an estimated 100,000 to 300,000 of them out there.
The Florida panther – already on the endangered list – is starving because the snakes ate its food supply.
Pythons even brought a hitchhiker from Southeast Asia: a lungworm parasite that has now infected native snakes in 35 Florida counties, killing species that had zero immunity to it.
Native wildlife populations are collapsing up and down the food chain.
DeSantis Turned the Bureaucratic Failure Into a Bounty System That Works
For decades, government agencies issued reports.
The pythons kept breeding.
Florida finally started paying hunters in 2017 when the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission launched the Python Action Team and the South Florida Water Management District created the Python Elimination Program.
Professional hunters earn $13 to $30 per hour depending on location, plus $50 for every python under four feet and an extra $25 per foot beyond that.
Catch a 12-footer and that's a $250 snake before your hourly pay.
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Governor DeSantis pushed the program further – opening more federal and state lands to hunters, boosting the PATRIC program budget to $2 million, and striking a private-sector deal with leather manufacturer Inversa that turned python skin into wallets, boots, and footballs.
That partnership increased per-snake pay by 60 percent.
The 2025 challenge alone removed a record 294 pythons in 10 days, with 934 participants from 30 states and Canada.
This Is How You Fight Back Against an Invasive Catastrophe
Picture what Taylor Stanberry did last August: ten days in South Florida heat, wading through chest-high sawgrass in the dark, grabbing pythons by hand or pinning them with a hook, dispatching them cleanly, and moving on to the next one.
He caught 60.
He went home with $10,000.
That's what the Florida Python Challenge actually looks like – and it starts Thursday.
The 2026 event runs from midnight July 10 through 5 p.m. on July 19, with $25,000 total in prizes across novice, professional, and military categories.
Registration is $25 and requires an online training course covering python identification and humane dispatch methods – the goal is dead invasive constrictors, not accidentally dead native water moccasins.
This year Everglades National Park is back as a partner and one of eight official competition locations – a significant expansion that puts more of the ecosystem within reach of hunters.
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What Florida figured out is something the federal government still refuses to admit: sometimes the solution to an ecological disaster is putting a bounty on it and trusting Americans to handle the rest.
Conservation bureaucrats spent years writing environmental impact statements while pythons ate the Everglades.
DeSantis paid hunters to go fix it.
The Everglades isn't saved yet – with up to 300,000 pythons still slithering through the sawgrass, this fight lasts decades.
But more than 27,000 removed since 2000 is 27,000 fewer apex predators wiping out native Florida wildlife.
And when those hunters pull on their boots Thursday morning, they'll be doing something the government spent 40 years failing to do.
Sources:
- Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, "Registration is now open for the 2026 Florida Python Challenge," FWC, May 19, 2026.
- South Florida Water Management District, "2026 Florida Python Challenge Dates and Registration is Now Open," SFWMD, May 19, 2026.
- U.S. Geological Survey, "How have invasive pythons impacted Florida ecosystems?" USGS.
- South Florida Water Management District, "Python Elimination Program," SFWMD.
- Staff, "Florida removes unprecedented number of invasive pythons in 2025," Washington Examiner, October 25, 2025.
- Staff, "Get Paid to Hunt Pythons: Inside Florida's Python Removal Programs," Second Nature USA, June 2026.
- Staff, "FWC announces results and winners of the 2025 Florida Python Challenge," FWC, August 13, 2025.
