Florida's 2026 Python Challenge Just Kicked Off — Here's What to Know
Python season is open in Florida.
The 2026 Florida Python Challenge began on July 10, sending hundreds of hunters into the Everglades with one goal — kill as many Burmese pythons as possible before July 19. First place takes home $10,000. Registration stays open through the final day of the hunt, so anyone who wants in can still sign up.
There are separate categories for novice and professional hunters, each with their own prize structure, giving first-timers a real shot at competing without going up against seasoned professionals for the same top prize.
What Happened Last Year
The 2025 challenge drew over 900 participants who collectively removed 294 pythons from the Everglades ecosystem. The winner was Taylor Stanberry, a professional python hunter from Naples who caught 60 pythons — nearly double what most competitors managed — to claim the $10,000 grand prize in her first year entering the competition.
Stanberry became the first woman to win the challenge since it launched in 2013. She used the prize money to establish Wild Stanberry's Sanctuary, a Naples-based nonprofit she built out of her own backyard. Before entering this year's challenge, she spoke to reporters and offered advice to this year's competitors — a full-circle moment for someone who came out of nowhere to dominate the event in her debut.
Why This Actually Matters
The Python Challenge isn't just a reality TV-style competition with a cash prize. It's one piece of a genuinely serious ecological crisis that Florida has been fighting for decades with limited success.
Burmese pythons were introduced to Florida through the exotic pet trade starting in the 1970s. People bought them as pets, they grew — sometimes to more than 20 feet and 200 pounds — and owners released them into the wild when they became unmanageable. The Everglades turned out to be nearly perfect habitat for a species that evolved in the swamps of Southeast Asia. Warm temperatures, abundant prey, dense vegetation, and essentially no natural predators allowed the population to explode.
The ecological damage has been severe and well-documented. Studies of Everglades mammal populations have found dramatic declines in raccoons, opossums, bobcats, and rabbits in areas with established python populations. Marsh rabbits and foxes have become nearly impossible to detect in some regions. The pythons can consume prey equivalent to 100% of their own body mass, meaning a large adult python can take down a deer. Threatened and endangered species aren't exempt — Florida Key Largo woodrats, for example, face real extinction pressure from python predation.
Beyond wildlife, pythons pose direct risks to humans and pets. Large adults are capable of killing and consuming dogs and cats, and attacks on humans, while rare, have occurred.
Can the Hunt Actually Make a Dent?
This is the honest question worth asking. The 2025 challenge removed 294 pythons. The 2024 challenge removed a similar number. These are meaningful contributions — every python removed is a predator no longer working through native wildlife — but population estimates for Burmese pythons in Florida range from tens of thousands to potentially over 100,000 individuals spread across a vast, difficult-to-access landscape.
No one believes the Python Challenge alone will solve the problem. What it does is raise public awareness, bring resources and hunters into the Everglades, fund ongoing removal efforts, and generate data that researchers use to understand python behavior and distribution. Professional hunters contracted by state and federal agencies remove pythons year-round — the challenge is the public-facing, high-profile component of a much larger ongoing operation.
Researchers are also exploring longer-term solutions including biological controls, thermal imaging from aircraft to locate pythons, trained detection dogs, and even radio-tagging "Judas pythons" that lead hunters to other members of the population. None of these are silver bullets, and the python problem in Florida is likely to persist for generations regardless of what the state does in the short term.
For now, 10 days, $10,000, and however many hunters show up to the Everglades with the motivation to try.
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