The state recognized that there was a problem down here in the Everglades and they wanted to do something about it.
So they started the pilot Python program and they hired a handful of contractors.
I was one of them. They predicted in the first year we would find anywhere from 50 to 60 pythons.
In the first year we found over a thousand.
Hi, everybody. My name is Shawna, and this is the American English Podcast.
My goal here is to teach you the English spoken in the United States.
Through common expressions, pronunciation tips, and interesting cultural snippets or stories, I hope to keep this fun, useful, and interesting.
Let's do it. We live in the Appalachians. which is a mountain range on the eastern side of the United States.
It's full of animals. And so, on a regular basis, in our neighborhood, there are bears walking on the streets, deer, squirrels, rabbits, raccoons.
We're in the heart of nature. And so, when I see neighbors on the street, it's a popular topic of conversation.
Last week, our neighbor friend stopped by and we started talking about snakes, specifically the wild videos he'd watched by a man called the Python Cowboy.
That name caught my attention. The Python Cowboy?
Lucas overheard the conversation and was like, Oh, yeah, I know the Python Cowboy.
That guy is crazy. He'll jump out of the boat and just land on a python.
After a little more chatting, it was apparent.
The python cowboy is, like his name, a wild python hunting guy from the Everglades who posts his catches on YouTube.
That's his voice that you heard in the introduction.
Now, it's because of him, the python cowboy, and my neighbor that I realized there needs to be a lesson on this podcast about the python situation in Florida.
It's just too crazy not to. Today, we're going to talk about the invasion of the Burmese pythons in the Florida Everglades.
How did they get there? Why are there so many?
And what is Florida doing to get rid of them?
We'll cover it all. This lesson will also touch on exotic pet ownership, a huge hurricane, and hunting pythons.
So we'll talk a little bit more about the python cowboy and others.
So get ready for an adventure. Stay tuned until the very end, and I'll share how you can come to Florida and catch pythons with your bare hands.
Sounds like I'm joking, but I'm actually not.
Let's dive into this wild story. In South Florida, there's a huge, wild place called the Everglades.
It's really big. In fact, it covers over 2,400 square miles.
That's bigger than Rhode Island and Connecticut combined.
It's also sort of a magical place. Every year, millions of people come to visit and explore.
People call it the River of Grass because a lot of it looks like a slow-moving, grassy river.
Under the grass, which they call sawgrass, is a landscape that is covered in water.
The Everglades is a wetland, which means it's land covered in water.
Yeah, it makes sense. And the thing is, it's full of life.
The area has a warm subtropical temperature, which makes it the ideal habitat for otters, turtles, birds, alligators, and even animals that live nowhere else, like the Florida panther.
The Everglades is so unique and special.
And for that reason, it became a national park.
It's also a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it's really important to Florida.
It helps keep Florida's water clean. It protects the coast from flooding during hurricanes, which, if you know Florida, it's common.
And historically, it was a safe haven for many endangered animals.
Historically is the key word here. It used to be safe.
The reason I'm using the past tense here is because there is a big problem in the Everglades.
A snake that doesn't belong there, called the Burmese python, has come in and it's rapidly reproducing.
As a result, it's eating way too many native animals, which significantly hurts the balance of the Everglades ecosystem.
How in the world did these massive snakes even get to South Florida?
In episode 58, I talked about exotic pets in the United States, and this ties right into that.
Pet laws vary a lot from state to state, and Florida has always been on the more relaxed side, especially back in the 80s and 90s.
At that time, owning an exotic animal was almost like a status symbol.
Tigers, big snakes. People wanted them because it was seen as cool and edgy.
And because Florida's laws weren't very strict, it was pretty easy to get these animals. all you needed was something called a class one wildlife permit, which covers animals like tigers, chimpanzees, huge snakes, animals that could pose a high risk to their owner.
So the state required proof that you had a big enough cage for the animal and and some experience, but it wasn't exactly hard to get if you were determined.
So you could get your class one wildlife permit, then head to an exotic pet store or a reptile expo, and these creatures were readily available.
Now, where did they come from? Southeast Asia, mostly.
According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, approximately 17,000 pythons came to the U.S. between 1975 and 1990.
And as someone interested in a pet like that, they were pretty cheap.
At trade shows, a python would cost as little as $20.
And at pet stores, they'd range from $65 to $75.
So what happened? All right, you've got an abundance of these exotic creatures, a lot of interest in them, and they're cheap.
So Burmese pythons, African rock pythons, boa constrictors of various sorts, well, people ended up buying them as if they were buying a fish or a hamster.
Now, I tried to find a statistic on how many households in Florida owned pythons back then.
And according to history.com, thousands of households in Miami jumped on the bandwagon.
In other words, when it became cool to buy snakes, many families followed the trend.
They jumped on the bandwagon. At first, for many inexperienced snake owners, the snakes were unique and interesting, but they grow big and they grow really fast.
So a baby python, which we'd call a hatchling, might be 50 centimeters, so around 20 inches, and then in less than a year, it can grow up to 2.4 meters. which is about eight feet, depending on what food they have access to.
A grown adult python can be over 20 feet long, which, if you're not familiar with feet, that's about the height of a two-story building.
It's about the length of a school bus. And to top it off, they can weigh up to 230 pounds.
Doing the quick math, that's around 100 kilos.
Now, some people who bought them had no idea what they were signing up for.
I mean, think about it. When did you have internet?
I don't know, for me, in the 90s, maybe the early 2000s.
So nobody was searching, is it a good idea to get a python on the internet?
They just got it. And a lot of them didn't know how much pythons eat, which is a lot, how strong they are, how much space they need.
And so what happened? When the snakes became too much to handle, too much to deal with, some people simply dumped them or just dropped them into the Everglades.
And since the Everglades is huge, there's no way to know how many people dumped their pythons there.
It wasn't until about 1995 that the snakes were regularly discovered.
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Exclusions apply. See details online. Many blame the issue on Hurricane Andrew.
You know how in the U.S. we give hurricanes names?
I'm sure you've heard of that before. Last year, we got hit by Hurricane Helene.
It was horrific in my city in Asheville, North Carolina.
And Hurricane Andrew was also a horrible hurricane for Florida.
So let's rewind to August 1992. In the United States in the early 90s, Bill Clinton was running for president.
Whitney Houston was topping the charts in music.
And Florida? Well, as usual, Florida was getting hit by hurricanes.
But it was getting hit by one of the strongest hurricanes in U.S. history, Hurricane Andrew.
Now, Andrew was a Category 5 hurricane. which is the strongest category of hurricanes.
Category 5 is catastrophic. Winds hit 165 miles per hour.
Roofs flew off buildings. Trees were being knocked down.
Telephone wires were falling left and right.
Entire neighborhoods around Miami were flattened.
They were leveled. It was catastrophic, and to add to the chaos, listen to this.
Among the buildings destroyed just south of Miami were pet stores containing exotic animals and a reptile breeding facility.
You might be thinking, what's a reptile breeding facility?
Now, to breed means to mate two animals together to get them to reproduce.
And so it's a place where you'd find snakes, lizards, turtles, and maybe some amphibians who are kept and bred.
So they're bred in captivity. And the eggs, or the hatchlings, so the babies after the eggs hatch, and adults, are sometimes sold in pet stores, zoos, they're given to researchers.
So a reptile breeding facility is like Costco for animals.
And the point is, there are a lot of reptiles in a facility like that.
Now imagine a hurricane destroying that building and all of those exotic animals being released.
It's a nightmare, isn't it? Just imagine being in a hurricane, which is bad enough, and then hundreds of pythons and exotic snakes being released around you.
It's unbelievable. That, like, cannot have possibly happened.
But it did. And it's unclear how many snakes and reptiles were unleashed into the world.
Animals weren't required to be microchipped or registered in a meaningful way at the time.
But many researchers estimate that between 100 to 900 Burmese pythons escaped.
It's impossible to know for sure. At first, it didn't seem like a big issue.
After the hurricane, people from Florida, which we call Floridians, were focused on getting food and water.
Families were reconnecting. There was a focus on rebuilding homes.
Missing snakes didn't seem like a big deal.
Or at least they weren't the priority. But most of those snakes didn't just vanish into thin air.
They didn't disappear. And they didn't die.
They actually thrived. Because the Everglades, and I like this comparison, I read this somewhere, it's compared to a five-star resort for pythons.
In other words, it's so perfect for them.
Warm and wet, like their native habitat in Southeast Asia.
And to top it off, it was full of hiding spots. and food.
Rabbits, raccoons, birds, baby deer. It was the perfect spot for a snake to hide, especially because there were no natural predators, so they had no competition.
They just thrived, and when an animal thrives, they multiply.
So one pregnant female can have up to 100 eggs in her belly at once.
It's not usually that much, typically around 36 on average, I believe.
But still, that's a lot of baby snakes they're putting into the world each year.
And since they live between 20 to 25 years in the wild, do the math.
Yeah, it's exponential. The point is, the more pythons there are, the more native animals they eat.
Donna Khalil, who's a python hunter, remembers driving through the Everglades as a child, and she said there'd be rabbits and raccoons and opossums all over the place.
Rabbits, you couldn't count them. There were so many.
Reports indicate that small mammal populations have decreased by more than 95% in some areas.
Entire populations of otters and raccoons have vanished.
Bobcats and other mammals are also decreasing.
Endangered animals. It's hard to tell what the future is for them, but it's not looking good in the Everglades.
And the point is, the delicate balance of Florida's ecosystem and what they call the food web started to collapse drastically since the early 2000s.
In English, we call unwanted animals invasive.
Burmese pythons are not native to Florida, and Florida does not want them.
They are invasive. It's now estimated that there are between 100 and 300,000 Burmese pythons in South Florida.
Some sources say 500,000. They've been found in other areas of Florida as well, including at a park just a few miles from Coconut Grove, Miami.
Now, the fear is that as they adapt to cooler climates, they'll move north.
So I asked ChatGPT to give me a real-life analogy for Florida's situation.
And it said, it's kind of like inviting a friend to your birthday party who ends up eating the cake, drinking all the juice, and chasing the other guests out of the house. which I thought was pretty funny as a comparison.
Now, I'd like to add that that friend is multiplying and now you have a house full of pests trying to eat all your food and, you know, take over.
At this point, you may be thinking, oh gosh, I'm not going to go to Disney this year.
I'll get eaten by a snake. Now, first off, Disney is far from the Everglades.
Secondly, it's nine times more likely that you'll get struck by lightning than get killed by a python.
It's extremely rare. First off, they're not venomous.
In other words, they don't have venom. They don't have poison.
So we can either say venomous or poisonous.
But they are powerful. They're constrictors, meaning they kill their prey by wrapping their long and strong bodies around it, and then they squeeze tighter and tighter, so they suffocate their prey.
Once the animal, their prey, can't breathe and dies, the snake swallows it whole.
It has this sort of elastic jaw, and you've probably seen this before, that they can stretch, sort of like a rubber band.
And it manages to eat raccoons, birds, deer, and even alligators.
Alligators used to be the dominant predator of the Everglades.
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So are snakes just all over the place? Well, maybe in South Florida, in the Everglades.
But the thing is, you will probably never see a python.
They may be up in the trees or on the grassy ground in their burrow.
When they are out in the open, they camouflage.
So their tannish black and yellow skin makes them blend in to their surroundings.
So chances are you're not going to see them unless you're closely looking for them or if you're on a hunt.
Which brings me to professional Python hunters.
I'll be honest, I didn't know this was a job, but it is.
In 2017, Florida launched the Python Elimination Program, which now has about 100 paid employees.
And they're all hunters. So the hunters go out looking for the pythons.
And they get paid between $13 to $30 per hour, depending on the location and if it's very sensitive.
And then they'll get an extra $50 per snake over four feet and another $25 extra per foot.
Okay. So they're out there removing nests.
They're looking for giant females so they don't lay any more eggs.
Some of the hunters, like Donna Khalil I mentioned before, have become local celebrities.
And since 2015, she's caught over 1,000 pythons.
Then there's, of course, the python cowboy, who I mentioned in the beginning.
He's all over the internet, and he's an advocate for using dogs to find pythons. dogs help scout out the burrows and to find the nesting mom with all of the eggs.
He claims that with the naked human eye, it's just not as effective.
How do you feel about using dogs for finding pythons?
Some people are probably really opinionated about that, I'm guessing.
So they're not allowed in the Python elimination program from my understanding.
So he left to do it on his own, but he started originally in that program.
I'll be honest, his videos are pretty entertaining.
Some of them are very informative. They're on a mission to help raise awareness about pythons as an invasive species in the Everglades.
They give the public info on how to help.
So that's pretty cool. I'll post a few of the links to the videos that I liked in the episode notes.
Which brings me to how you can get involved if it's your cup of tea.
The Florida Python Challenge. And once a year in July, hunters from around the world go to the Everglades to take part in what's called the Florida Python Challenge.
In 2025, over 900 participants came to take part in it.
And there's prize money for the person who catches the most snakes.
I believe it was $10,000. There's also a prize for the longest snake.
But it's not easy work. It's hard and sweaty and it's dangerous.
But for the people who come, it's thrilling.
You don't know what you're going to find.
I mean, there's alligators out there, a bunch of exotic animals, and there's a chance you might get bit.
And what makes this challenge a bit tricky is that as a participant in the hunt, you can't use guns, you can't use poison or traps, you can use your hands and other tools.
When a python is caught, the hunter takes it to an official station.
The snake is measured and weighed. And then the snakes are then euthanized as per Florida state law.
So all of the snakes are dead. Then what happens to them?
My first thought was, well, can they be eaten?
I mean, think about it. If you get a 17-foot snake and you can slice that into patties to make burgers.
Do people make Python burgers? I mean, that's what was going through my head.
No, actually, it's not good to eat because there's a lot of mercury in their bodies.
So Florida's Department of Health recommends against it.
But even so, some people have experimented making jerky with it, sausages.
Once again, not recommended. So the snakes aren't generally used for food.
Some are used for scientific studies to learn more about the pythons and their habits, their diet, so they end up in labs.
But ultimately, the contractor, so the hunter, can decide what they want to do with the snake.
Many choose to make products with them. So snake skin, especially the python pattern, is desirable by many.
And so it's profitable. Wallets, shoes, purses, and yeah, products like that are pretty expensive.
In one video I watched, one of the contractors stated that he sold his python skins to high-end designers like Gucci.
I can't verify that for sure, but that's an interesting business model, right?
Go capture snakes and sell them to high-end designers?
In recent years, the Python Challenge has brought in about 180 to 200 pythons annually during the challenge, which goes to show how hard it is.
I mean, the war against pythons is what we'd call an uphill battle.
Have you heard that term before? An uphill battle?
It means that it is very difficult to succeed at.
There are a lot of obstacles. It's very challenging.
It's an uphill battle. Remember, one female may lay up to 100 eggs in a year.
And just compare it to the 10 days for 900 participants to capture 180 to 200 pythons.
Now, I don't mean to be a negative Nancy, but it's like trying to plug a hole in a ship with scotch tape.
Like, that's not going to be super effective long term.
So are there any creative ways to get rid of these pythons?
Well, the first and very obvious way to slow down the spread of them is to stop the problem at its source.
And fortunately, Florida now banned the sale and ownership of Burmese pythons without a permit.
And they've cracked down on illegal breeding, exotic pet releases.
They even have now what are called pet amnesty days, where people who have giant reptiles can drop them off at one of the drop-off locations.
There won't be any questions asked. And so that's a good thing to have another solution other than dropping in the Everglades.
And then to catch the existing ones, there are other creative solutions.
Number two, scientists are working with Python DNA, trying to understand the environment DNA to detect snakes in the water.
So there's lots of water samples and a lot of stuff I don't quite understand, to be honest, because I'm not a scientist.
Another thing I did understand was a clever trick that scientists are using called the Judas snake.
Here's how it works. So they'll catch a male python, they'll put a GPS tracker on it, and then release it into the wild.
Because during mating season, male pythons head directly towards the females.
Scientists follow that signal and then can remove them.
Last but not least, our fourth thing, and this is super recent, so I'll need to update you in a future episode.
Robotic decoy rabbits were recently created.
So these fake rabbits look like stuffed animals that we have in our house as toys.
And they are waterproofed. They're solar powered.
They mimic the heat and motion of real rabbits.
And the idea is that they'll attract snakes to them.
And once they do, there's a little trigger that will alert the authorities to track down some of these big snakes interested in eating them.
Only time will tell how effective these robo bunnies are.
So I will update you in the future. Florida, with the help of the python hunters, has removed thousands and thousands of snakes.
One source I saw said 23,000, so it's only up from there. but it's going to take a lot more python hunters and a lot of creativity, in my opinion.
After doing this research, it's really kept me up at night.
I'm like, hmm, what if Florida puts snake birth control in the water?
Like I learned that pythons can't thermoregulate, so they regularly go in the water to cool down when the weather is hot.
My thought with that would be, in 25 years, all of the snakes would be gone because the current ones would die of old age.
But then I remembered, oh wait, Miami uses this water as drinking water.
That wouldn't work. Then I was like, well, what if you put 4,000 nets into the water, like one every mile?
I guess that wouldn't really work, though, because it's square miles.
I was just thinking maybe there's a way to catch them by creating this sort of filter in the water.
Not sure how complicated that would be. Sounds quite complicated.
But yeah, can you come up with a creative solution for controlling this invasive species?
Feel free to send me a message on Instagram at American English Podcast.
Once again, the question is, what would you do?
What creative solutions can you come up with to help Florida deal with the pythons?
Now let's wrap up today's lesson. The truth is, this problem isn't going away anytime soon.
The Everglades is massive, it's humid, swampy, it's full of hiding places, and pythons just blend in.
Not only that, they lay tons of eggs. It's more about control now, so making sure they don't go north towards Miami and to Disneyland.
The key is to keep the population in check.
According to the python cowboy, the sign of a healthy environment is seeing native species again.
So if you come across an otter, a raccoon, or any other small mammal out there, it's a sign that there's a chance at fighting back.
For now, let's just say this is one of the wildest and most challenging animal invasions in U.S. history.
See you next time. Bye. Thanks and hope to see you soon.
