The winner of this year’s annual Florida Python Challenge hunted down and eliminated 96 invasive Burmese pythons from the Everglades national park, as part of an initiative to remove hundreds of the snakes from the area every year.
The challenge invites hunters to participate in 10 days of capturing and humanely euthanizing as many of the invasive snakes as possible across eight designated hunting locations, with the winner taking home a cash prize of $10,000. The event is hosted by Florida fish, wildlife and conservation (FWC), the south Florida water management district, the National Park Service and others.
This year’s competition drew 907 participants from 30 US states, as well as Canada and Vietnam. The winner, Tom Rahill, harvested 96 Burmese pythons, all from the Everglades. A python hunter by trade, Rahill founded an organization called SwampApes in Broward county that takes veterans suffering from PTSD on python hunts in Florida’s wetlands.
In comments reported by Naples Daily News, Rahill told an FWC meeting in Panama City on Wednesday: “I was on a mission to get one of our veterans a big snake. I did it. And we wrestled this thing … The veteran was just over the moon.”
Once that was achieved, he said he went deeper into the Everglades, where he found the 96 snakes. Over the course of 10 days in July, 280 snakes in total were removed. Before the competition began, 1,400 pythons had been taken out this year.
The challenge also awards several other cash prizes, including $1,000 for the longest python killed, which this year went to Rahm Levinson, who hunted a snake measuring 16ft 5in.
Burmese pythons are native to south-east Asia, and have wreaked havoc since they were first found in the Everglades ecosystem in the 1990s, consuming resources and wiping out a significant portion of the area’s native wildlife. The apex predators are incredibly hard to detect, contributing to the population ballooning to a number that conservative estimates put in the tens of thousands.
Females can lay dozens of eggs, sometimes up to 100 annually, and although many hatchlings do not survive to adulthood, there are fears the pythons are reproducing faster than they can be caught. The annual challenge is therefore now held during the summer hatching season in a bid to boost the number captured.
Aimed at raising public awareness of invasive species, and getting the public involved in conservation and efforts to protect the Everglades ecosystem by controlling the number of Burmese pythons, the event has seen more than 1,600 of the snakes removed from the area since 2017. Combined with FWC contractors, who hunt the reptiles year-round, that figure rises to more than 19,000 snakes removed since 2017.
Sarah Funck, program coordinator at the FWC, told Wednesday’s meeting that there is no “silver bullet” to solve Florida’s python invasion, but stressed that the elimination of just one python “is a win for Florida’s native wildlife”.
