Fifteen years ago, a cold snap froze much of Florida's wildlife to death — including many of the state's invasive Burmese pythons (Python bivittatus). But in this excerpt from "Slither: How Nature's Most Maligned Creatures Illuminate Our World" (Gand Central Publishing, 2025), science writer Stephen Hall reveals that a subset of these pythons were genetically predisposed to survive the cold, setting the stage for rapid evolution that could help the invasive snakes spread further into North America.
