WASHINGTON -- You don't think of pythons as big-hearted toward their fellow creatures. They're better known for the bulge in their bodies after swallowing one of those creatures whole. But the snakes' ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about biodiversity and the hidden quirks of the natural world. There have been multiple documented incidents where large ...

Pythons are famous for swallowing enormous meals whole—including morsels bigger than their own body mass. In order to digest these infrequent feasts, the snake’s heart works overtime by increasing its ...

People at the University of Colorado Boulder thought Leslie Leinwand had lost her mind when she decided to start studying snakes nearly 20 years ago. It was a research paper that sparked her interest ...

The origins of Florida’s python crisis lie in the exotic pet trade of the 1980s and 1990s. These snakes were initially sold as pets but were frequently abandoned in the wild once they outgrew their ...

One of Florida's most anticipated events of the year is almost here — the 2025 Florida Python Challenge. The Burmese python is a large, nonvenomous constrictor snake that is an invasive species in ...

Thousands of invasive Burmese pythons are spread out across more than a thousand square miles of South Florida. The first record of a Burmese python in the Everglades was in 1979. Since then, they've ...

Despite miles of ground covered as we drove through the Everglades under the cover of darkness, it was impossible to ignore the fact that we hadn’t spotted a single mammal. The expansive wetlands in ...