04/24/2026
The most successful predator in South Florida isn't from South Florida.
The Burmese python (Python bivittatus) is native to the jungles of Southeast Asia, not the cypress sloughs of Collier County. It arrived through the exotic pet trade across the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s via a mix of escaped animals, intentional releases, and, in the prevailing origin story, the rupture of a breeding facility during Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Four decades later, it is the most consequential invasive vertebrate in the Florida Everglades, and its established breeding range now brushes the eastern edge of Naples.
Adults regularly exceed 15 feet. The Florida record approaches 20. They are ambush constrictors with no natural predators in this hemisphere, no seasonal dieback to check their numbers, and a reproductive output native wildlife cannot match: a single female can produce 50 to 100 eggs per clutch. In the Everglades interior, long-term surveys have documented catastrophic declines in marsh rabbits, raccoons, opossums, bobcats, and white-tailed deer directly correlated with python expansion. In some survey zones, small mammals are now functionally absent.
That absence is the point.
The same wetlands that make Southwest Florida ecologically rich, Big Cypress National Preserve, Fakahatchee Strand, Picayune Strand, and the agricultural interior of eastern Collier County, are the exact habitat a Burmese python selects. Pythons do not need Naples to love them back. They need freshwater, cover, and prey density, and the western Everglades delivers all three.
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) treats them accordingly. Pythons can be humanely killed year-round on private land with landowner permission and on 32 Commission-managed lands without a permit or hunting license. The annual Florida Python Challenge and the state's contracted removal programs have pulled tens of thousands of pythons from the landscape, and biologists are unanimous that the visible take is a small fraction of the actual population.
Naples sits at the western edge of that population. Confirmed sightings remain rare on the coast but are not impossible in canals, golf-course lakes, retention ponds, and the wooded interior east of I-75. Any suspected sighting should be reported immediately.
FWC Exotic Species Hotline: 1-888-IVE-GOT1 (1-888-483-4681)
Report online: MyFWC.com/Python
There is a lesson in a species like this, and it is not a comfortable one. A coastline can be engineered. Its landscaping can be perfected and its waterways manicured into a calendar image. The wilderness behind it still has the final say about what lives in it. The Burmese python is not a Naples animal. It is a reminder that Naples has never actually been separate from the Everglades.