The 2024 Florida Python Challenge has come and gone. Ronald Kiger of Marion County, Florida, was the grand prize winner after snatching up 20 Burmese pythons. Pythons are an invasive species to Florida with no natural predators. As such, they eat tons of Florida’s animals and have no other living creature to keep their numbers in check. No other living creatures, that is, other than certified python lord Ronald Kiger.
The annual Python Challenge is a contest put on by the state of Florida that aims to reduce python populations in the Everglades to maintain ecological balance. The event was held over 10 days and included over 800 people from across North America. All told, the contestants removed the 195 pythons from the Florida Everglades. That’s a little bit shy of last year’s tally of 209 pythons collected, but it’s still pretty impressive, considering that this year’s contest had 200 fewer participants than last year’s.
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Kiger won the top prize and received a $10,000 reward for his haul after having finished as the first runner-up in 2023’s competition. The challenge is broken into separate categories for novices, professionals, and those with military experience. A competitor named Dennis Krum caught the longest python in the entire competition, with his snake coming in at an astonishing 9 feet and 11 inches.
While the competition does take a huge chunk out of python populations, handling the snake population is a year-round job. The South Florida Water Management District has the unenviable task of having to deal with every python that hatches from the egg of a female python, and they can lay a lot of eggs. Anywhere between 50 to 100 at a time. That explains why the competition is held during hatching season, which occurs in August. Since 2000, the wildlife agency says that around 22,000 pythons have been removed from the state.
Burmese pythons were brought to South Florida in the mid-1980s when people imported them from South Asia to be exotic pets. Given the location and the era, it’s probably safe to assume that a lot of those people were drug lords. Pythons are not venomous and tend to ignore people and pets, but they wreak havoc on native wildlife and ecosystems. Pythons also carry around astonishingly high levels of mercury, which they spread through the ecosystem.
So now you understand why, for as backward as Florida can sometimes be, when it comes to Burmese pythons, the state’s “kill them all, let God sort ’em out” ethos works just fine.
