For 10 days this summer, 907 people from 30 states, plus Canada and Vietnam, went into the sawgrass and cypress of South Florida with a single shared purpose: find Burmese pythons and take them out of the Everglades. They removed 280 of the invasive constrictors, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission announced in its official results for the 2026 Florida Python Challenge [1][2].
The grand prize of $10,000 went to Tom Rahill, who caught 96 pythons, every one of them inside Everglades National Park [1]. That is more than a third of the entire event's total, from one hunter working one landscape he clearly knows intimately. The longest snake of the competition went to Rahm Levinson, who brought in a python measuring 16 feet 5 inches [1]. The category winners tell their own story about who shows up for this event: Christina Kraus led the professional category with 36 pythons, Bart Shreve took the novice category with 9, and Stephen Payton won the military category with 3 [1].
"The 280 pythons removed...is a major victory for Florida's native wildlife," FWC Chairman Rodney Barreto said, crediting what he called strong partnerships for the result [1].
The reason Florida stages a competitive python hunt at all is grim underneath the festival energy. Burmese pythons are an apex predator with no natural check in the Everglades, and they eat the marsh rabbits, wading birds, and other native animals the ecosystem is built around. The Python Challenge's answer is participation: open the hunt to the public, pay prizes, and let hundreds of people become part of the removal effort. This year that meant 907 registered participants, some traveling from as far as Vietnam to wade into the wetlands [1].
The 280 pythons sit inside a much longer effort. Since 2000, removal programs across Florida have taken nearly 28,000 wild pythons out of the landscape, a cumulative figure built over a quarter century and counted separately from this year's challenge total [1].
What the results do not do is end the problem. The wild python population in South Florida is estimated to be far larger than any single year's removals, challenge or otherwise, and the collapse of native mammal populations in the southern Everglades has already happened. Removing 280 snakes does not restore what was lost. What it does is subtract 280 breeding-capable predators from the marsh, keep a public spotlight on an invasion that thrives on being invisible, and train a growing pool of people who know how to find an animal that is notoriously hard to find.
That last part may be the quiet achievement here. A 16-foot python is an astonishing thing to encounter in the wild, and nearly a thousand people volunteered to go looking. The Everglades needs every one of them, and every year the challenge keeps proving they will come [1][2].
