Burmese pythons removed from Florida

Somewhere between 2002 and 2022, wildlife officials in Florida kept pulling increasingly large snakes out of the Everglades, and television executives in New York kept charging increasingly more money for thirty seconds of attention during a football game, and the two numbers have walked upward together (r = 0.959) with a straightness that feels almost tidal. A python in South Dade; a beer commercial in Los Angeles. Both categories insisted on expanding. Nobody stopped them.

Florida's python removals climbed from a few dozen snakes in the early 2000s to more than 2,500 captured in 2022 alone, as the invasive population in the Everglades ballooned following Hurricane Andrew's 1992 destruction of a breeding facility; Super Bowl ad costs, meanwhile, climbed from $1.9 million in 2002 to $7 million in 2024, a curve shaped by fragmented TV audiences fleeing to streaming and advertisers paying a premium for the one night a year when everyone still watched something live together. The connection is the decade rather than the mechanism — both are stories of invasive pressure on a shrinking habitat, in one case alligators and in the other everybody not watching Monday Night Football.

A python coils; an ad rolls; two kinds of apex predator at work. The ecosystems absorb both, roughly.