佛罗里达蟒蛇猎杀赛悬赏重金，一人十天抓获 96 条

Ten days, ninety-six snakes, ten thousand dollars.

That is the scorecard of this year's winner of Florida's python-hunting contest.

It sounds like a novelty story, but it is actually a thirty-year war that will most likely never be won.

First, what these snakes are.

They are Burmese pythons, native to Southeast Asia, among the largest snakes in the world; a full-grown one can pass five metres.

They do not bite people. Their method is to coil around the prey and then swallow it whole.

The problem is that Florida did not originally have a single Burmese python.

So how did they get there?

Mostly the pet trade.

In the 1970s and 80s it became fashionable in America to keep big snakes as pets.

A small snake was cheap — a few tens of dollars — and did not look frightening.

But it grows, and far faster than its owner imagined; once it reaches three or four metres an ordinary household simply cannot keep it.

So some people quietly released them into the wild, telling themselves this was kinder than killing them.

There is also an account that a hurricane in 1992 tore apart a local breeding facility and a batch of snakes escaped in the chaos.

The real trouble began once they reached the Everglades.

The Everglades is a vast wetland in southern Florida, warm and humid year-round — for a snake from Southeast Asia, close to a purpose-built home.

More importantly, it has no natural predator here, and it can lay dozens of eggs at a time.

No predator plus a high breeding rate, and the result is a population out of control.

So how many Burmese pythons are in Florida now?

Honestly, nobody knows the exact number.

The usual estimate is a hundred thousand to three hundred thousand, and that range is itself the point: we cannot even pin down the order of magnitude.

What have they eaten?

Studies have found that some small and medium-sized animals in the Everglades, raccoons for instance, have declined by more than ninety percent.

That is not 'fewer'. In places it is close to gone.

Local animals have no experience of living alongside a large python; they do not know what to hide from, and cannot get away.

Florida has tried many things: bounties, professional hunters working the wetland year-round, training dogs to sniff out snakes.

The python contest is the one that broke through to the public.

The rules are simple: sign up and you can join, and whoever catches the most Burmese pythons takes the top prize.

This year's contest was open for just ten days.

More than nine hundred people took part, from thirty states, and some flew in specially from Canada and Vietnam.

Over the ten days, everyone together caught two hundred and eighty.

The winner is Tom Rahill, who caught ninety-six by himself — more than a third of the entire field.

He did not turn up on a whim: he has been catching pythons for well over a decade, at a professional level.

He also founded an organisation called Swamp Apes, which takes veterans and first responders into the wetland to hunt snakes.

It sounds a little odd, but the logic holds up.

Many veterans, back in ordinary life, develop trauma responses: they sleep badly, find it hard to be around people, feel they have lost their place.

Whereas hunting snakes in a wetland has a clear task, teammates, and a result you can actually see.

Rahill's own line is that they are not there to receive charity — they are there to work.

Right, now for the question you have probably already worked out.

Two hundred and eighty snakes in ten days, and Florida has at least a hundred thousand.

At that ratio, the contest's direct effect is close to zero.

Ecologists broadly agree: a once-a-year contest cannot clear the Burmese python out, and cannot even be said to control it.

So why hold it every year?

Researchers give three reasons.

First, data: every snake handed in is measured and recorded, an important source for understanding how this species actually lives there.

Second, people: the contest sends a thousand-odd ordinary people into the wetland each year, and some of them stay on as long-term volunteers or professional hunters — and it is that group, working year-round, that actually makes a difference.

Third, attention: the overwhelming majority of Americans have no idea what is happening in the Everglades, and a contest with prize money gets it into the news once a year.

In the end, the lesson of the Burmese python matters more than the python itself.

Once a species establishes itself in a new environment, it is essentially irreversible: you can suppress it, you can slow it, but you can rarely truly eliminate it.

What Florida spends on managing this today dwarfs those few-dollar snakes of decades ago.

Think about it: if something is already certain to be unfixable and can only be held down by spending forever, would you keep paying?