This New Footage From Florida Everglades Shows Something No One Was Ready For

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]It's a dog eat dog world, but in this case, we're talking about snakes. Dozens of snakes were released into the wild in North Florida to eat other invasive snakes.

[00:00:10]>> Yeah. Okay. The ones that were set free were raised in Lake County and brought up there. Fox 35's Randy Hildrith explains why this is so important.

[00:00:16]>> The trail camera footage from the Florida Everglades was only supposed to confirm what scientists already feared.

[00:00:22]Instead, it showed them something no one was ready for. Two small shapes on the forest floor. an image that was not supposed to exist on that land. Not now.

[00:00:32]Not for another 40 years, at least. The researchers who watched the clip play back went quiet in a way that field scientists almost never go quiet. One of them walked out of the room because the footage was not the worst part. What the footage meant and what is moving toward it right now is worse.

[00:00:50]The room went silent.

[00:00:53]Hoffman has spent her career waiting for this frame of video to exist. For more than four decades, Eastern Indigo snakes had been functionally absent from North Florida. The Orian Center and its conservation partners had spent years restoring a 6,000 acre preserve in the Florida panhandle called Appalacha Bluffs and Ravines. They replanted longleaf pine forests. They reintroduced gopher tortoises to rebuild the underground burrow networks the indigo depends on for shelter. They released captive bred snakes one annual cohort at a time. Every year they waited. Every year the cameras returned with nothing.

[00:01:31]>> We are here in South Alabama in one of the national forests releasing 17 eastern indigo snakes onto the forest as part of our reintroduction project.

[00:01:41]>> Then two hatchlings appeared in the footage. They had never been touched by human hands. They had never been radiotracked, supplementally fed, or registered in any release manifest. They were born to parents that had been living and hunting entirely on their own terms on land that had not supported wild indigo reproduction since before most Americans were alive. Hoffman chose her words carefully when she described what she was seeing. She said finding evidence of reproduction was one of the biggest markers the project team had been looking for. She called the footage a big signal. Then she added something field scientists almost never allow themselves to say out loud. She said she was not expecting this level of success this early. Brad O'Hanlin, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission's Reptile and Amphibian Conservation Coordinator, was blunter.

[00:02:31]He called the entire effort one of the gold standard conservation projects in the state of Florida.

[00:02:36]>> Indigo snakes have a super wide prey base. It's not uncommon to hear about an indigo snake eating a rattlesnake or eating a copper head. And part of the reason why we chose this, >> you have to understand why a field biologist's hands were shaking. Because it was not just about reproduction. The eastern indigo snake was reintroduced into the panhandle for a very specific reason. The indigo is a confirmed snake eater. It is the longest native snake in North America. It is completely immune to the venom of every pit viper on the continent. And it is built from the shape of its jaw down to the muscle fiber of its body to hunt other snakes on the forest floor. It was the long game answer to the worst reptile invasion in American history. Which means those two hatchlings are not just a recovery milestone. They are soldiers.

[00:03:25]And something nobody fully predicted is already moving toward them from the south.

[00:03:30]A river of grass.

[00:03:33]To understand what those hatchlings are walking into, you have to understand what is at stake 400 miles to the south.

[00:03:40]The Florida Everglades is not a swamp.

[00:03:43]It is a slowm moving river of grass 1 and a half million acres wide, spreading in a shallow sheet across the bottom of the Florida peninsula. It is drinking water for 8 to 9 million people. It is the hurricane storm surge buffer for every major city on the lower Atlantic coast. It is the recharge zone for the aquifer the entire region depends on. In 2025, the Everglades Foundation in Earth Economics published a study putting a number on those services, $ 31.5 billion per year. Over 50 years, the asset value of the Everglades ecosystem comes to 1 trillion. Paul Hinsley, chief economist at the Everglades Foundation, said the research confirms the Everglades is a vital component of South Florida's economy that brings real benefits to every household in the region. Josh Cousins of Earth Economics went further.

[00:04:36]He said the trillion dollar figure was a gross underestimation because the value of the portable water supply alone could not be fully calculated. UNESCO designated the Everglades a world heritage site in 1979. It is one of only three places on Earth to simultaneously hold UNESCO World Heritage status, biosphere reserve designation, and Ramsar wetland of international importance recognition.

[00:05:02]The other two are the Great Barrier Reef and the Gapagos Islands. This is the scale of what was here. This is the scale of what is now being consumed. And the thing consuming it got into Florida through a front door nobody thought to lock.

[00:05:17]The pet trade unleashed it.

[00:05:20]The first Burmese python ever found inside Everglades National Park was recorded in 1979 near the Tamiami Trail.

[00:05:29]One snake in 1 and a half million acres of wetland. Nobody raised an alarm.

[00:05:34]Through the 1980s and '90s, Miami became the undisputed hub of the American exotic reptile trade, processing more than 12,000 wildlife shipments per year.

[00:05:44]Between 1996 and 2006, more than 100,000 baby Burmese pythons were imported into the United States. They were 20 in long and sold for as little as $10. What sellers did not advertise was what those snakes become. A hatchling in your palm grows at a rate of up to 4 ft per year.

[00:06:04]Within a few seasons, a $10 novel is a 12 to 20 foot animal weighing up to 200 lb. Overwhelmed owners drove to the edge of the nearest canal and let them go.

[00:06:15]Then in August of 1992, Hurricane Andrew tore open a reptile breeding facility near Homestead, >> though. And the question is, is it a threat to us? It's only a threat in the sense that it's not that far from us by the way these storms go.

[00:06:29]>> We are expecting the storm to start turning on a more westward track similar to this.

[00:06:34]>> And an unknown number of captive pythons escaped into the wetlands. But the hurricane is not the beginning of the story. Ian Bartok, the wildlife biologist at the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, who has tracked Florida pythons longer than almost anyone, put the origin plainly. If the cause were a multiplechoice question, A would be escaped pet. B would be intentionally released. C would be a meteorological disturbance, and the answer would be D, all of the above. A 2011 genetic study confirmed pythons had been breeding in southern Florida since before 1985.

[00:07:10]By 2000, wildlife officials acknowledged a self- sustaining, actively reproducing population inside Everglades National Park. The United States banned importation in January of 2012. Florida criminalized ownership entirely in 2021.

[00:07:27]By then, the USGS estimated the population at tens of thousands. Other researchers placed it between 100,000 and 300,000 animals. Steve Davis, chief science officer of the Everglades Foundation, described the detection problem in terms that make every removal number look small. For every one python a person sees in the Everglades, field estimates suggest somewhere between 100 and 1,000 others, they do not see. And the ones nobody was seeing were eating.

[00:07:55]Before we get to what those unseen pythons did to the food web, and you need to see this part because it is where the scale of what was lost becomes undeniable. Hit subscribe now and turn on notifications. This story is still unfolding. When the next piece of it breaks, and it is breaking every few months, this is where you will hear it first. The swamp went silent.

[00:08:17]In 2012, 11 scientists published a paper in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The lead author was Michael Dorcis of Davidson College. His team drove the 130 km main park road inside Everglades National Park at night. Applying the same route, the same speed, and the same counting method used in surveys conducted in 1996 and 1997.

[00:08:43]The earlier surveys had covered nearly 6600 km across 51 nights. The new surveys covered more than 56,000 km over 8 years. The comparison was direct. The comparison was complete. Raccoon populations had fallen by 99.3%.

[00:09:00]Apossum populations had dropped by 98.9%.

[00:09:04]Whit-tailed deer were down 94.1%.

[00:09:08]Bobcats had declined by 87 1.5%. Marsh rabbits were not detected once during the entire 8-year survey period. Foxes were not detected either, not reduced, not suppressed, gone from the landscape entirely. Dr. Dorcas wrote that the magnitude of the declines underscored the enormous density of pythons that must already exist inside the park to have produced such results. His co-author Dr. Robert Reed at the USGS offered a comparison that lands like a weight. It had taken 30 years for the brown tree snake to nearly eliminate the mammals and birds of Guam after World War II. In the Everglades, the same level of destruction had apparently been achieved in 11 years. The spatial pattern made causation undeniable. The worst losses appeared where pythons had been established the longest. At control sites beyond python territory, mammal populations were near historical levels.

[00:10:04]The collapse tracked the invasion in both time and space. In 2015, a controlled experiment published in the proceedings of the Royal Society be removed any remaining uncertainty. 95 radio tagged marsh rabbits were released inside Everglades National Park and at python free control sites. Inside the park, pythons killed 77% of the tagged rabbits within 11 months. At the control sites, python predation was zero. The rabbit population was effectively eliminated in under a year. A follow-up study in 2021 found the geographic footprint of python-l mammal collapse had approximately doubled since the 2012 paper with no evidence of recovery.

[00:10:46]Researchers who had worked this land for decades described driving for miles through habitat that used to be alive and seeing nothing. They called it the silence. And they were wrong about one thing. The silence was never empty. It was full of something they had not yet identified.

[00:11:04]Every weapon failed.

[00:11:07]Florida did not sit quietly while its wilderness disappeared. The state mobilized hunters, deployed technology, launched competitions, and paid professional contractors to remove as many pythons as possible. The Florida Python Challenge launched in 2013. We're going to turn now to the hunt in Florida tonight for pythons on the loose. Many of them let go by their owners and now multiplying. And so this evening here, ABC's Matt Gutman with a team of hunters in the Everglades.

[00:11:34]>> In its first year, 1,600 participants removed 68 pythons. By 2025, 934 participants removed 294.

[00:11:45]Michael Kirkland, who oversees the South Florida Water Management District's python elimination program, described the competition with unusual government cander. He called it more of an awareness program than a management tool because removing two to 300 snakes per year from a population of at least 100,000 functions about as effectively as draining a lake with a soup ladle.

[00:12:07]Thermal drones failed for a precise biological reason. Burmese pythons are ectothermic. Their body temperature equilibrates with the surrounding environment which makes them nearly invisible against the thermal background of a warm Florida wetland. Researchers from Embry Riddle Aeronautical University confirmed even visual drones struggle to detect pythons in tall grass. Baited traps failed because Burmese pythons do not pursue food. They are ambush predators built to wait motionless for prey to come within range. The USGS confirm no known attractant exists that pythons will reliably approach. Drift fence traps cannot be installed at scale because the Everglades sits on limestone bedrock.

[00:12:52]Professional removal programs launched in 2017 through Florida Fish and Wildlife's Patrick program and the South Florida Water Management District's python elimination program.

[00:13:03]>> Patrol working to eliminate invasive big snakes from the Everglades.

[00:13:07]>> Local 10 was there as the 50th python to be killed was officially weighed and measured today. Local 10's Michael Seiden has more from Homestead.

[00:13:15]>> Approximately 100 paid contractors now work the Everglades year round. In July of 2025, a partnership with a Miami based artificial intelligence company produced 748 python removals in a single month. The cumulative total of all removals since 2000 cross 23,500 animals by 2025. The most sophisticated tool remains the Judah snake program. A captured male python is surgically fitted with a radio transmitter and released. During breeding season, the tag snake follows female pheromone trails.

[00:13:52]>> I'm talking about snakes. And the University of Florida is sending invasive Burmese pythons back into the wild. And it is all in an effort to track these unwelcome guests >> and leads researchers directly to mating aggregations. Bartok has operated the largest ongoing version since 2013, deploying 40 scout snakes across 200 square miles of southwestern Florida.

[00:14:14]His team has removed more than 20 tons of python biomass and prevented an estimated 20,000 eggs from hatching. In 2023, the USGS made its position on eradication official. Complete elimination of Burmese pythons in southern Florida is in their assessment likely impossible. The parallel to Australia's cane toad crisis is precise.

[00:14:37]102 cane toads were introduced to Queensland in 1935.

[00:14:42]After 90 years of escalating control efforts, eradication has been formally abandoned. Florida is three decades into the same trajectory. But here is the thing nobody factored in when they were counting pythons. The pythons were never the only thing that came across the water.

[00:14:59]The hidden invader.

[00:15:02]This is the point in the story where the two hatchlings at Appalachiccola stop being just a recovery milestone and start being something else. Its name is Ryeliadella orientalis. It is a pentastamid, technically a parasitic crustation rather than a worm, 3 to 4 in in length, with four hardened hooks built for gripping the tissue inside a snake's lungs. In Southeast Asia, Burmese pythons carry it without serious harm. They coexisted with it across thousands of years of shared evolution.

[00:15:32]In Florida, it entered a landscape of native snakes that had never encountered anything like it. It began filling their lung tissue, blocking their airways, and suffocating them from the inside. Dr. Christina Romagosa, associate research professor of invasion ecology at the University of Florida's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, co-advised the foundational research documenting the parasite spread. She has spent years watching this organism move through counties it should not be able to reach. She said co-introduced pathogens and parasites are not often considered in the management of biological invasions and this discovery adds to the growing knowledge of disease impacts that come with moving animals around the globe. Here is why that matters. The transmission chain runs through three hosts. Adult parasites in an infected snake's lungs release eggs through the animals waste. Cockroaches consume the waste and carry the larve.

[00:16:28]Frogs and lizards eat the cockroaches.

[00:16:30]When a native snake eats an infected frog, the larae migrate through the stomach wall directly to the lungs, mature into bloodfeeding adults, and begin producing a new generation. Once this cycle is established, it runs without any python involved at all. A 2020 study examined more than 500 dead native snakes collected across southern Florida. 13 of the 26 native snake species in the region were already infected. And here is the part that actually matters. The parasite achieved significantly higher infection intensity inside native snakes than inside the pythons themselves, growing larger and reproducing more aggressively in hosts that carry no evolved resistance. By 2025, 18 native snake species showed confirmed infections across 27 to 35 Florida counties, a range that had long since outrun the pythons. The parasite had been detected in Elatchua County near Gainesville, 340 km north of Python territory. It had reached Jacksonville.

[00:17:31]It had been found in Okaloosa County in the Florida panhandle. A single 2025 paper by Paul Misano and colleagues at the University of Central Florida documented 14 new county records. Stson University's Terry Frell has spent years documenting pygmy rattlesnake populations in Florida. He identified the detail that separates this parasite from every other invasive species problem in Florida. It survives frost inside its host's body. Pythons are cold-blooded and facehard climatic limits on how far north they can spread.

[00:18:05]The parasite has no such ceiling. Field researchers at preserve sites in the panhandle have reported severe local population declines in pygmy rattlesnakes linked directly to the parasite. In small body native snakes, adult parasites can physically fill and block the entire lung cavity. A 2025 immunology study documented unusually strong innate immune responses in Florida cottonmouth blood plasma, which may explain why cottonmouth populations appear more resilient than others despite confirmed infection. That mechanism, if it can be understood, might one day become a tool for protecting more vulnerable species. For now, here is what you need to know. The eastern indigo snake, the species confirmed reproducing in the wild for the first time in 40 years, has already been linked to a parasite caused death in at least one documented case. The animal around which the recovery program was built is walking toward the parasite before it has a chance to reach the pythons.

[00:19:05]Nature fights back.

[00:19:08]On a night in December of 2022, Ian Bartoik's team received a transmitter signal from a python they had tracked for six consecutive breeding seasons.

[00:19:17]His name was Loki. He was 13 ft long. He weighed 52 lb. He had survived half a decade of South Florida predators, six seasons of professional python hunters and every thermal drone and hunting license the state of Florida could throw at him. When Bartoshik's team reached the coordinates that night, they did not find Loki alive. They found a carcass.

[00:19:40]Loki had been killed, cashed, and partially consumed. The predator weighed 25 lb. It was a bobcat. David Schindle of the US Fish and Wildlife Service had set a trail camera near the kill site, and the trail camera had recorded the entire encounter. The bobcat approached from behind. It identified its moment.

[00:20:01]It took down an animal more than twice its own weight, dragged the carcass into cover, and ate what it could before leaving the rest for later. A 25-lb cat killed and cashed a 52-lb python. Bartok has told this story a 100 times since.

[00:20:17]Every time he calls it a win for the home team, it was not a fluke. A peer-reviewed 2023 study by Curillo and colleagues published in management of biological invasions was the first to formally document native Florida wildlife predating on invasive Burmese pythons in the scientific literature.

[00:20:37]American alligators were confirmed consuming juvenile pythons across multiple recorded instances. Florida cotton mouths were confirmed through radiography to have killed and swallowed young snakes. A hpid cotton rat, an animal that should, by any logic, be prey, had killed a hatchling python. In June of 2021, a trail camera at Big Cypress National Preserve filmed a bobcat raiding an active python nest and eating the egg straight from the clutch.

[00:21:04]Necropsies conducted by Bartoic's team found bobcat claws and bobcat fur inside the stomachs of adult pythons. The predator relationship runs in both directions. The bobcats hunt the pythons. The pythons sometimes hunt the bobcats, and the bobcats are winning frequently enough to keep coming back.

[00:21:24]Eastern indigo snakes at and near the Appalachic release sites have been observed consuming python hatchlings.

[00:21:31]Bartok described tracking a hatchling python's transmitter signal across multiple field seasons, only to find the signal had gone quiet inside the territory of an eastern indigo snake. He called those moments exactly what they are, evidence of the Everglades fighting back. And here is the angle almost no one is covering. What is happening in the Florida Everglades right now is not only an ecological catastrophe. It is the fastest forest ecological evolution ever documented in North America. The native animals that survived the first wave of the python invasion are not behaviorally the same animals they were 20 years ago. A bobcat that has learned to identify the sluggishness of a freshly fed python as a kill window is a different predator than a bobcat that has never seen a python before. An alligator that has encountered hatchlings in the water is a different hunter than one operating in a pythonfree environment. The animals that are surviving are the ones finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in a predator they had no evolutionary history with three decades ago. They are doing it through learned behavior. They are doing it fast. The pythons are being shaped by the pressure, too. Bartoshek's long-term radio tracking data documents consistent movement of pythons away from human access corridors over time. The cautious ones survive. The visible ones do not.

[00:22:53]Natural selection is running on both sides of this war simultaneously, and nobody knows yet which side is running it faster. This is where the two hatchling snakes come back into the frame. The eastern indigo snake born wild at Appalacha in 2023 is growing into this war right now. 209 snakes have been released at the preserve across nine consecutive years. The 2025 cohort was the largest single-year release yet at 42 animals. Hoffman's team is watching a recovery that is real, measurable, and accelerating. Every year, the cameras return with more evidence that the reintroduction is working. Every year, the survival numbers climb. But so is the parasite advancing through every intermediate host between the panhandle and South Florida. So is the python pushing its range boundary northward. And so is the threefront race that the two hatchlings were born into without knowing it.

[00:23:50]Understand what this actually looks like on a map. On one side, the indigo moves south slowly, cohort by cohort, toward the python territory it was bred to defend. On the other side, the parasite moves north through cockroaches and frogs and lizards and every native snake species in its path toward the indigo. A third line, the python range, creeps its own boundary upward through the warming waterways of central Florida. Somewhere between Appalachiccola and the Everglades, those vectors are going to meet. And when they meet, the outcome of everything Hoffman's team has built will come down to whichever line crosses the other first. If the indigo reaches the python range before the parasite reaches the indigo, the reintroduction works.

[00:24:36]The longest native snake in North America hunts the invader it was bred to hunt. The ecosystem gets its apex snake back. If the parasite reaches the indigo first, it enters the hatchling's lungs before they are old enough to breed. And 40 years of conservation work slows against something microscopic that nobody saw coming. Bartoshek put the stakes in terms that are almost impossible to absorb. The native predators are recognizing Burmese pythons as a food source. They are learning to take advantage of their vulnerabilities. The ecosystem is rebalancing itself imperfectly and painfully and slowly, but it is doing it. The swamp is not dead. The bobcats are learning. The indigo is breeding in the wild for the first time in 40 years.

[00:25:23]The alligators have never stopped fighting. And the two snakes born without human hands are somewhere in the longleaf pine forests of North Florida right now, growing longer, moving south, carrying a war they were engineered to fight before anyone knew the enemy was going to come in two directions at once.

[00:25:40]Somewhere in that forest, a trail camera is still rolling. Somewhere in a quiet viewing room at the preserve, another clip is being queued up and reviewed frame by frame. And somewhere along the unseen line between the panhandle and the Everglades, two vectors are closing on each other at a speed nobody can measure. Nobody knows yet how it ends.

[00:26:00]So tell us, drop your prediction in the comments. The invader, the parasite, or the home team. And if you want to find out who wins this war before anyone else does, subscribe now and turn on notifications. This story is still being written in real time, field season by field season, county by county, hatchling by hatchling. When the next chapter breaks, this is where you will hear it first.