Florida wildlife officials have confirmed a new "satellite population" of Burmese pythons in Charlotte County, well north of the Everglades where the invasive giants have dominated for decades, raising fresh questions about whether removal programs can keep pace.
A spokesperson for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission told ABC News that the breeding population has taken hold in a western section of Charlotte County, north of Naples and Fort Myers. The confirmation marks the first time state officials have publicly identified an established python foothold that far outside the species' known South Florida stronghold, USA TODAY reported.
Until now, the FWC described the established range as stretching from just south of Lake Okeechobee to Key Largo and from western Broward County west to Collier County, a vast swath of wetland, but one still centered on the Everglades basin and Miami-Dade County. Charlotte County sits above that boundary, meaning the snakes have pushed into territory the state's two main removal programs were not originally built to cover.
The agency has not said how large the Charlotte County population is, when it was first detected, or whether it grew from natural range expansion or a separate introduction. Those gaps matter. A satellite colony that arrived independently, from released or escaped pets, for instance, would suggest the python problem is not merely spreading outward from a single epicenter but seeding new ones.
As of April 2025, more than 23,500 Burmese pythons had been pulled from Florida's natural areas. Of that total, over 11,000 were removed by contractors working under two state-run programs: the FWC's Python Action Team Removing Invasive Constrictors, known as PATRIC, and the South Florida Water Management District's Python Elimination Program. The two programs operate "in tandem" across designated public lands.
Those are big numbers. They also haven't stopped the population from expanding. The FWC itself acknowledges that the snakes are "cryptic", a polite way of saying they are extremely difficult to find in dense vegetation, and that confirming new areas of establishment takes time. Adult Burmese pythons have few natural predators in Florida, and they prey on native wildlife, including threatened and endangered species.
The snakes can grow to over 20 feet, though most captured in Florida measure between six and ten feet. In adulthood, they outsize nearly every native snake species. Their tan coloring and dark, giraffe-like blotches help them vanish into the landscape, one reason the removal numbers, while impressive on paper, have not translated into containment.
Encounters between humans and dangerous wildlife have become an increasingly common theme across the country. An Arizona mother recently fought off a coyote that attacked her young daughter, a reminder that these confrontations are not limited to remote wilderness.
The SFWMD's Python Elimination Program contracts removal agents to work across seven South Florida counties: Monroe, Miami-Dade, Broward, Collier, Hendry, Lee, and Palm Beach. Charlotte County, the site of the new satellite population, is not on that list.
Pay for the contractors varies by search area. The regular rate is $14 per hour. Premium zones pay $20 an hour. Ultra-premium assignments, presumably the most remote or difficult terrain, pay $30 an hour, with a cap of ten billable hours per day. The FWC's PATRIC application form describes the work as "demanding" and notes that most contractors remove more than 30 pythons per year.
The FWC recruits "hunters, anglers" and other "outdoor recreationists with experience removing pythons or other large constrictors from the wild." That language suggests the state knows its best asset is not bureaucratic manpower but the kind of people who already spend time in the backcountry, and are willing to do grueling, low-paid work because they care about the land.
Wildlife threats are not always confined to the swamp. A Montana woman recently used bear spray to stop a charging moose, and a solo runner near Anchorage fought off a brown bear on a trail, encounters that underscore how often ordinary Americans find themselves on the front line of human-wildlife conflict.
The Charlotte County confirmation raises an uncomfortable question for state officials: if the existing contractor programs cover seven counties and the pythons have already established themselves in an eighth, how far behind is the response?
The FWC has not disclosed what criteria it uses to formally declare a population "established," nor has it said whether the Charlotte County colony falls within the SFWMD program's designated operating area. If it does not, the state may need to expand the program's geographic footprint, and its budget, to address a threat that is no longer contained to the Everglades watershed.
Conservation efforts elsewhere have shown that protecting native species sometimes requires creative solutions. Officials in St. Louis, for example, turned off the Gateway Arch lights to shield migrating birds from man-made hazards, a far simpler fix than tracking a breeding population of apex predators through subtropical swampland.
Florida's python crisis is not new. What is new is the proof that the snakes are colonizing ground the state's own maps did not mark as occupied. More than 23,500 removals and two dedicated programs have not prevented range expansion. The satellite population in Charlotte County is a fact on the ground, literally, and the state has yet to explain how it plans to respond.
The late Animal Planet personality Ed Cassano was killed in Arizona after stopping to observe a snake on the roadside, a tragic reminder that encounters with reptiles carry real consequences far beyond Florida's borders.
When an invasive species keeps expanding despite decades of effort and tens of thousands of removals, the honest conclusion is not that the programs are working, it is that they are not working fast enough.
