15-foot python was almost a buzzer-beater in the annual Python Challenge
It was like sinking an absolutely stunning buzzer beater only to realize that time had expired. The Glades Boys, a team of Burmese python hunters, were participating in the last day of the annual Python Challenge on Sunday when they yanked a 15-foot, 3-inch, 86-pound beast from the underbrush at around midnight.
The animal could have brought them a handsome bounty if it turned out to be the longest snake of the contest. But alas, the competition had ended just hours earlier.
The Python Challenge, which runs for 10 days, entices hundreds of hunters each year to cruises South Florida backroads in search of the invasive, and highly destructive snake, and awards a $10,000 first prize for the most snakes captured, and a $1,000 prize for the longest snake. Snakes, especially big ones, are hard to come by, though. It might take a hunter three nights to find one snake, and months or years to snag one over 10 feet.
Last year, Dustin Crum’s 11-foot snake took the prize, so the Glades Boys (Jake Waleri and his cousin Steve Gauta) think the 15-footer would have been a front-runner this year.
It’s not the biggest invasive python the cousins have caught, however. Just last month, Waleri wrestled the longest snake ever recorded in Florida, a 19-footer behemoth, from the swamp.
Waleri spotted Sunday’s 15-footer from the back of a pickup while cruising at 20 mph down a dirt road in Big Cypress Preserve about 40 miles west of Naples. “I just saw this giant head above the brush. It was periscoping, perched up like a cobra,” he said.
His friend Kylie Cook slammed on the truck’s breaks, and the snake dropped out of sight. Waleri sprinted over and was able to find it.
“If it wasn’t periscoping, I never would have seen it,” he said.
Waleri and Gauta are python-hunting guides who take clients out on nightly hunting tours, and though they normally don’t let clients handle snakes larger than 11 feet, Waleri made an exception for Jack Cronin, who’d been obsessing all night about making a catch. “He jumped right on the head and controlled it pretty well,” said Waleri. The snake had wrapped itself around some trees and it took three people to wrangle it loose.
The snake was a female, which makes it more meaningful for the Glades Boys. Removing large females from the Everglades ecosystem is particularly effective as a conservation measure: They typically lay 20-60 eggs in a clutch and are capable of laying 100.
In some areas of the Everglades, biologists believe the snakes are responsible for an 80-90% decline in populations of mammals such as racoons, possums, rabbits and otters. Larger snakes eat ever bigger prey. Scientists at the Conservancy of Southwest Florida has found that nearly all of the snakes they examine that weigh more than 100 pounds have deer remains in their guts. Deer are an important part of Florida’s hunting tradition, and a crucial prey item for the endangered Florida panther.
The invasive snakes were brought to Florida as part of the exotic pet trade, and started showing up in the southern Everglades in the 1980s. By 2000, biologists determined that the species was reproducing successfully and expanding their range north. Recent estimates show the invasion front reaching Lake Okeechobee.