New Footage From Florida’s Swamps Reveals an Aftermath No One Expected

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Predator becomes prey in the Florida Everglades as hundreds of hunters descend on the Sunshine State to catch and kill as many Burmese pythons.

[00:00:13]New footage from Florida's swamps reveals an aftermath no one expected.

[00:00:17]And when scientists pressed play on this trail camera clip, the room went dead silent. Not because of what it showed, because of what it meant. We all know the story. Pythons invaded. They wiped out 90% of the mammals. The Everglades went quiet. But this footage was captured deep inside the Big Cypress National Preserve. And what it recorded is something that 20 years of government money, professional hunters, and militarygrade tracking never produced.

[00:00:45]Something has changed inside that swamp.

[00:00:47]Something nobody engineered and nobody predicted.

[00:00:53]The river that forgot how to move.

[00:00:56]Think about living in the same house your entire life. You know every sound.

[00:01:00]The birds outside, the neighbor's dog, the kids playing down the street. Then one morning you wake up and all of it is gone. Not just quiet, silent. You step outside and nothing is moving. No birds, no dogs, no kids. The street looks the same, but it feels like a movie set after everyone vanished overnight. That is what happened to the Everglades.

[00:01:23]Biologists who had worked the swamp for decades started returning from fieldwork with the same report. They called it the silence. They would drive along levies that once teamed with raccoons, apossums, and rabbits. Roads where you used to see animals crossing every mile.

[00:01:40]Now they could drive for hours and see nothing. Not fewer animals. None. It was as if the entire base of the food chain had been pulled out from underneath everything else. and the rest of the ecosystem hadn't caught on yet. The numbers confirmed what the field teams already felt in their gut. Raccoons down 99.3%, apossums down 98.9, bobcats down 87.5, marsh rabbits and foxes are completely gone. Not a single sighting across nearly a decade of surveys. And this isn't some faroff wilderness that only hikers care about. If you live in South Florida and you turn on your kitchen tap, the water that comes out runs through the Everglades first. 8 million people depend on it every day. It's also the wall of mangrove and wetland that stands between your house and a hurricane storm surge. Without it, the next category 5 doesn't just flood your street, it takes the street with it. A 2025 study valued the whole system at $31.5 billion a year. Over 50 years, that adds up to a trillion dollars. And that trillion dollar system runs on a food web. The food web was being eaten from the bottom up. Like termites chewing through the foundation of a house while the family upstairs still thinks the floor is solid. People tried to stop it. Florida launched the Python Challenge, an annual event where anyone willing to wait into the swamp could hunt invasive Burmese pythons for cash prizes. The 2025 event broke records.

[00:03:17]934 hunters from 30 states removed 294 snakes in 10 days. Taylor Stanberry, the first woman to ever win the grand prize, caught 60 pythons on her own hunting barefoot in Crocs.

[00:03:31]>> Meet Taylor Stanberry, the first woman to ever win the ultimate grand prize of the Florida Python Challenge. And she did it in historic fashion. But here's the rest of the math. Since 2000, every program combined has removed just over 27,000 pythons from Florida. The estimated number still out there sits between 100,000 and 300,000. That's like killing one mosquito in a room full of them and calling it progress. Then the snakes started to adapt.

[00:04:03]The weapon nobody sold on purpose. In August of 1992, Hurricane Andrew ripped through southern Florida at category 5 strength. Winds passed 165 mph. A reptile breeding facility near Miami came apart. An unknown number of Burmese pythons slipped into the wetlands and disappeared. But the hurricane wasn't the main reason. Throughout the '90s, you could buy a baby Burmese python at a reptile expo for $10. Cute little thing.

[00:04:34]Small enough to curl around your wrist.

[00:04:37]Perfect party trick. What nobody told you at the register was that the cute little thing in the palm of your hand turns into a 10-ft 50-lb killing machine within a few years. It stops being fun real fast. It outgrows the terrarium. It starts looking at the family cat differently. So, overwhelmed owners did what overwhelmed owners do. They drove to the edge of the Everglades, opened the bag, and walked away. They told themselves they were being kind. What they were actually doing was dropping a loaded weapon into the most defenseless ecosystem in North America. And the Everglades never stood a chance. Think about it from the raccoon's point of view. Your species has been here for thousands of years. You've never faced a predator that can sense your body heat in total darkness. The way you'd spot a flashlight beam across a pitch black room. You've never met anything that can hold its breath underwater for 30 minutes, just sitting there beneath the surface, waiting for you to walk past.

[00:05:37]You've never encountered something that blends so perfectly into dead grass and shallow water that you could step 3 ft from it and never know. The raccoon doesn't get a warning. One moment it's walking through the underbrush, the next moment it's wrapped in coils and it's over. A single female python lays up to 100 eggs at a time. No natural predators in the Everglades, the population exploded. And since only about 1% of Burmese pythons are ever seen or caught, for every snake a hunter pulls out of the swamp.

[00:06:09]>> Well, you know, every year Florida hosts the python challenge. And every year, this 10-day event attracts hunters to the Everglades to help curb this.

[00:06:16]>> 99 more are out there that nobody will ever know about. But the scariest part isn't how many there are. It's what they're becoming. When scientists tested 400 captured pythons, 13 carried DNA from a completely different species, the Indian rock python. Burmese pythons love water. Indian rock pythons prefer high, dry ground. Mix the two together and you get a snake that can hunt anywhere, swamp or forest, wet or dry. Then in January of 2010, a cold snap killed between 40 and 90% of the python population. Sounds like good news.

[00:06:54]Except the snakes that survived weren't random. They carried genes that helped them handle cold. Almost like running an internal furnace powered by constant digestion. They passed those genes to every generation after them. The cold snap didn't weaken the population. It filtered out the weak ones and left behind something tougher, something better built for a future that includes the occasional Florida freeze. Florida wasn't fighting the same snake it started with. It was fighting an upgraded version, and the upgrades kept coming. The silence between the trees.

[00:07:28]Every method Florida tried came back empty. Thermal drones can't spot a cold-blooded animal in a swamp that's already 90°. It's like searching for an ice cube in a hot bath with a thermometer. Robot decoy rabbits didn't work because ambush predators don't chase, they wait. Now, the high-tech solution. Florida is deploying robotic rabbits to help capture invasive Burmese pythons in the Everglades. The Judah snake program, where you put a tracker inside a male python and follow it to a breeding female, works, but it covers a tiny piece of 1 and a half million acres. And then the pythons made things harder on their own. Ian Bartosic's team at the Conservancy of Southwest Florida tracked snake movements over several field seasons and found something that changed the math again. The snakes were relocating, not randomly. They were pulling away from the levies and roads where hunters walk.

[00:08:24]>> Good snack, man.

[00:08:25]>> Good job.

[00:08:25]>> Congratulations, Thorne. Well, >> thank you.

[00:08:27]>> That's awesome.

[00:08:28]>> We just got stumped by a newbie. moving deeper into sawrass and mangroves so thick you'd need a machete and chest waiters just to go 20 yards. Picture walking through waist deep mud in 100°ree heat pushing through grass taller than your head knowing there's a 12-oot snake somewhere nearby that you can't see but that can absolutely see you. Whether the snakes were individually learning to avoid humans or whether the bold ones kept getting caught while the cautious ones bred in peace, the result was the same. The python population was teaching itself how to disappear. Every weapon Florida brought to this fight has been answered.

[00:09:06]The swamp was adapting faster than the people inside it. The home team.

[00:09:12]Then something happened that nobody predicted. In December of 2022, Bartok's team followed a radio signal from a 52-lb python named Loki into the Big Cypress National Preserve. They'd been tracking him for weeks. When they reached the coordinates, Loki's head was gone, chewed clean off. Bartoshek set up a trail camera at the body. The next day, the killer came back to finish the meal. A bobcat, 25 lb, half the weight of the snake it had just killed. Think about that for a second. A bobcat, roughly the size of a large house cat, walked up to a snake that could swallow a deer, found the right moment, and won.

[00:09:53]It waited until the cold slowed the snake's reflexes, came in from behind the head where the coils couldn't reach, and bit through the neck. By the time the python could react, it was already dead. Bartok went quiet for several seconds. Then he told his team to pull every camera in the area immediately, and it wasn't a one-time thing.

[00:10:16]>> Predator becomes prey in the Florida Everglades as hundreds of hunters descend on the Sunshine State. 18 months earlier in June of 2021, trail cameras in the same preserve caught something that had never been recorded before. A bobcat walked up to an unguarded python nest, ate the eggs, came back the next day for more.

[00:10:36]>> It was all captured on camera last summer when a US Geological Survey team set up a wildlife cam near a female they had tagged, >> and on the fourth day fought the 14t mother python when she returned. By the time biologists arrived, the nest was destroyed. 42 eggs that would never hatch. 42 pythons that would never be born. Black bears started killing pythons during cold snaps when the snake's muscles slow down so much they can barely coil. A Florida panther was filmed taking down a midsized snake in open sawrass. Across the ecosystem, native predators were finding the same crack in the python's armor. the short window after a big meal when even a perfect ambush predator is slow and exposed. Like a boxer who just ate Thanksgiving dinner trying to fight in the first round. A 25-lb cat killed a 52-lb python. Bartok told reporters that's a win for the home team. But one bobcat can't undo what 300,000 pythons have done. The real change isn't the score. It's the direction. For 20 years, this was a one-sided slaughter. Now, for the first time, something in the Everglades is pushing back. And 400 m north, something else was coming back from the dead.

[00:11:54]The king returns.

[00:11:56]The eastern indigo snake is the longest native snake in North America. Jet black, built like a weapon, completely immune to rattlesnake and cottonmouth venom. It doesn't squeeze its prey the way most snakes do. It pins the head down and crushes the skull with its jaws. the way you'd crack a walnut with a pair of pliers. Other snakes are what it eats for breakfast. This animal used to own the long leaf pine forests of the southeast. Then developers paved over those forests through the midentth century, and the gopher tortoise, whose underground burrows the indigo depends on for shelter the way you depend on your house during a blizzard, disappeared with the trees. By 1978, eastern indigo snakes were gone from North Florida. not endangered, gone.

[00:12:43]What came next took 40 years. Think about that number. 40 years of people showing up to the same patch of forest, planting trees, burning brush, rebuilding habitat inch by inch for an animal most of them would never live to see come back. The Nature Conservancy restored longleaf pine at the Appalachiccola Bluffs and Ravines Preserve in Liberty County. 6,500 acres rebuilt one section at a time. The Central Florida Zoo bred indigos in captivity. A federal fish hatchery raised them for 2 years until they were strong enough for the wild. Starting in 2017, they began releasing snakes. By 2025, 209 had been put back. Then in the autumn of 2023, a trail camera caught something that made the entire team stop what they were doing. Two small eastern indigo hatchlings moving through the underbrush. not released snakes.

[00:13:41]Wildorn, the first indigos born in the wild in North Florida in roughly 50 years. Dr. Kevin, one of the lead scientists, watched the clip twice. Then he picked up the phone to call his team.

[00:13:55]His hands, by his own account, were not steady. The king was back, building a wild population on its own terms without human help.

[00:14:05]40 years of work had finally produced something that could survive without the people who started it. And somewhere between those baby snakes and the swamp to the south, something was already waiting.

[00:14:18]The thing inside the thing.

[00:14:22]While every headline and every dollar chased the pythons, something else had slipped into the Everglades.

[00:14:28]Something you can't see without a microscope.

[00:14:31]something that had been spreading quietly for over a decade before anyone even knew to look for it. Its name is Riotella orientalis.

[00:14:40]Scientists call it the snake lungworm, though it's not actually a worm. It's a parasite, a pale little creature about the size of a bean sprout that crawls inside a snake's lungs and feeds on its blood. In a Burmese python, it barely matters. Pythons have been carrying this thing for millions of years. Their lungs are big enough to handle it. The way a truck barely notices a few grocery bags tossed in the back. But a native Florida snake didn't grow up with this passenger. Its lungs are smaller, more fragile. Take the dusky pygmy rattlesnake. A little snake barely 2 ft long. A handful of these parasites is all it takes. They fill the lung cavity the way packing peanuts fill a shoe box, and the snake slowly suffocates from the inside. It doesn't happen fast. It takes days. The snake gets weaker, stops eating, starts lying in the open where it never would have rested before, and then it doesn't get up. Jenna Palmisano, a biologist at the University of Central Florida, found a sick one in 2023. The little rattlesnake was flipped on its back, belly up, barely moving. It died in her hands. When they opened it up, the lungs were packed. Palmisano later said the hardest part wasn't losing that snake. It was knowing there were thousands more out there dying the same way, alone in the grass where nobody would ever find them. And here's what makes this thing a nightmare you can't wake up from. The way it spreads has nothing to do with pythons anymore. An infected snake passes eggs in its droppings. Cockroaches eat the droppings. Frogs eat the cockroaches.

[00:16:23]Any snake that eats an infected frog picks up the parasite. The chain keeps going on its own. The lungworm doesn't need the python to spread. The same way a fire doesn't need the match once the house is burning. Since it was first found in a native Florida snake in 2012, the lungworm has spread to at least 20 counties and infected at least 19 of Florida's 46 native snake species. black racers, cotton mouths, corn snakes, king snakes. In areas where it's been established longest, pygmy rattlesnake numbers have dropped in a pattern that lines up almost perfectly with when the parasite arrived. Palmisano built a monitoring network called the Snake Lungworm Alliance to track the spread.

[00:17:06]Before she started it in 2022, there was nothing. No federal program, no surveillance system. Billions had gone into fighting pythons. The thing quietly killing Florida's native snakes from the inside got almost zero. And that blind spot is about to cost more than anyone imagined.

[00:17:26]The collision nobody mapped.

[00:17:28]Those eastern indigo hatchlings in North Florida are growing. The wildorn population is spreading into the surrounding habitat. In late 2024, biologists found a released male measuring 6 ft long, healthy, thriving.

[00:17:43]proof that the forest can support them.

[00:17:46]In 2025, 42 more indigos were released, the largest group ever. The program is picking up speed. The hope is real.

[00:17:55]People who spent their entire careers on this are for the first time allowing themselves to believe it worked. At the same time, the python population has been creeping north, following warmer temperatures and the waterways connecting South Florida to the rest of the state. Scientists have found python DNA north of Lake Okichchobee. The lungworm has gone even further, reaching St. John's County in northeast Florida, hundreds of miles beyond where any python has ever been spotted. Carried by native snakes and frogs, one county at a time. Three forces heading toward each other. The indigos moving south, the pythons moving north. The parasite spreads in between, riding the food chain through every piece of habitat it touches. Nobody has mapped where these ranges meet. Nobody has tested whether the indigo can survive the lungworm.

[00:18:49]Nobody has modeled what happens when they collide. And the people who handraised baby indigos for 2 years before releasing them into a forest they spent four decades rebuilding are watching the parasite data come in county by county knowing it's getting closer to their snakes. And there is nothing they can do to speed up the science fast enough to get answers before the collision happens on its own.

[00:19:14]And here's the fact that changes the meaning of everything you just heard.

[00:19:18]Eastern indigo snakes are already on the confirmed infection list for this parasite. The animal that 40 years of conservation work, 209 captive bred releases, and millions of dollars were built to bring back is already vulnerable to the same disease that came from the same invader it was designed to fight. If the indigo population pushes south into infected territory before anyone knows whether it can survive what's waiting there, it walks straight into a trap. The cure meets the disease before it ever meets the enemy. That is the aftermath that new footage from Florida's swamps reveals. An aftermath no one expected. Not a clean victory, not a total collapse. Something stranger than either. Four forces colliding inside a system that millions of people depend on for the water they drink and the roof over their heads during a hurricane. An invasive snake that's hybridizing and evolving with every generation. A parasite that infects any species it touches. An ancient predator coming back from the dead. And native animals that spent 20 years being eaten alive and are now starting to bite back.

[00:20:30]The bobcats are killing pythons. The king is breeding in the wild for the first time in 50 years. The swamp is not dead. But the lungworm doesn't care who wins. It infects whatever eats whatever's infected. And nobody knows if the indigo can handle it. We spent 25 years and billions of dollars fighting the snake. We could see thermal drones, Judith snakes, hunting competitions with cash prizes and news helicopters. The python became the monster on every news segment, the villain on every bumper sticker, and maybe it deserved to be.

[00:21:08]But while every dollar and every camera pointed at the big snake, something the size of a paperclip was eating through the lungs of the very animals we were trying to save. No federal tracking until 2022. No monitoring network until a graduate student built one from nothing. The question the Everglades is asking now is whether we spent a generation fighting the wrong enemy.