“In my 10 years of doing this I don’t think I’ve ever seen this much snake sign in one place,” says Bartoszek, a wildlife biologist and science coordinator for the Conservancy of Southwest Florida. “The ferns were all batted down. It looked like a group of bears had been rolling around but it wasn’t bear sign, it was snake sign. So we knew it was about to get real.”
Florida Python Trackers Remove Two Giant Mating Balls in Record Day of Snake Hunting
Steve was a snake hunter. I bet that would even give him pause.
Through early 2024, the conservancy has removed more than 1,300 pythons from a 150-square-mile area near Naples, most of them caught through the tracking program. That’s the equivalent of 35,000 pounds of snake, or more than 17 tons, Bartoszek says.
There are some slight signs of progress.
Even more frightening is the fact they may be expanding their turf to the north and showing up in seemingly impossible places. In 2017, a python was found in open water nearly 15 miles off the coast of southwest Florida, Bartoszek wrote in a scientific note published in Herpetological Review.
500 pounds of python caught when mating rituals revealed in Florida marsh, team says