The social lives of Pythons

Ball pythons in a huddle, with white arrows to indicate their heads.Credit...Noam Miller and Morgan Skinner/Wilfrid Laurier University We have learned that a variety of snakes from rattlesnakes to some colubrid species have social lives in the wild and now a recent study is showing that pythons are social creatures too! Morgan Skinner, a quantitative ecologist who studied at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario created an environment with 4 hides and set to work with several different ball pythons to see exactly what happened. He published his results in Behavior Ecology and Sociobiology in November.

Because ball pythons lay eggs and don’t have live births and have no need to hibernate, they seemed like the perfect study candidate. In 2020, Dr. Skinner and his colleague Tamara Kumpan placed a mixed-sex group of six pythons for 10 days in a large enclosure — one with enough plastic shelters for each snake — and left a camera running. To Dr. Skinner’s shock, all six snakes quickly squeezed together in the same shelter and spent over 60 percent of their time together. Assuming that all of the snakes had simply liked something about that specific shelter, the team removed it. But after some initial confusion, the snakes eventually chose another home base in which to curl up together.

To read the full article and see the video, be sure to visit the New York Times here. There is a link to the study in the article.