It's the combination of warm weather, humidity, hurricanes, swamps, native fauna that includes alligators, snakes, panthers, lynx, fire ants, armadillos, spiders, cockroaches so big that they could function as commuter planes and other things that are boring for Florida, but considered quite “out there the rest. Look, that's what's going on with Florida. It's not that we have access to all the oddities. Human nature guarantees that strange things can happen anywhere.
What differentiates Florida is that it produces more rare news than anywhere else, and our rare news tends to be rarer than anyone else's. No other state is going to have a guy who faked a python rescue. Rural counties, particularly in Central Florida and the Panhandle, are traditionally much poorer and produce a disproportionately high number of Florida Man stories, according to a geographical sample study conducted by The Guardian. But if the Florida Man challenge has faded from the collective psyche, Florida Man as a journalist clearly hasn't.
With studies showing that rising sea levels threaten to engulf Florida by the end of the century, some fear that Florida Man's days may be numbered. As a Spanish territory, Florida once encompassed not only present-day Florida, but also much of the Southeast. From the Florida Everglades teeming with alligators and pythons to bears, panthers and other wild animals that invade urban areas, nature has always played a role in Florida Man's stories.
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