Python bivittatus is native to South and Southeast Asia, where hunting for skins and meat and the loss of wetland habitat have driven declines steep enough for a Vulnerable listing. Populations in several countries are fragmented and reduced.
In southern Florida a separate population, established from released or escaped captives and detected as breeding by the year 2000, now occupies the Everglades and surrounding wetlands. Road-survey work has recorded severe declines in mid-sized mammals in the areas longest occupied by the snakes, with raccoons, opossums and bobcats falling sharply and marsh rabbits largely disappearing from some sites. Removal programmes take thousands of pythons, yet the population persists because the animals are cryptic, long-lived and highly fecund.
The mismatch is not a contradiction. A conservation category is assessed on the global native range, so a species can be genuinely at risk where it evolved while causing ecological harm where humans have moved it.