The ball python does not seem like a snake with hidden depths. Small African pythons, they’re the second most popular pet reptile in the world, beloved for their rich colors, intricate patterns and docile tempers. They are easily bred and almost always kept alone.
“People don’t think of certain snakes as social at all, especially in the reptile hobby,” said Morgan Skinner, a quantitative ecologist who studied at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. “And they tend to keep them alone or isolated, because of these preconceptions.”
But in a study published last week in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, Dr. Skinner and his colleagues show that ball pythons are much cuddlier with one another than anyone had guessed.
The study of snake social behavior has been undergoing a renaissance over the past few years, said Noam Miller, who is an author on the paper and also at Wilfrid Laurier. Researchers have tended to focus on garter snakes and rattlesnakes, which both give birth to live young, spend winters together massed in dens and form “friendships” during active seasons.
While working on his doctorate in Dr. Miller’s lab, Dr. Skinner began wondering how snakes not known to be social interacted with one another.
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.
As the team repeated the experiment over the next few years — with five different cohorts of young pythons — the pattern held. Twice a day, Dr. Skinner came in and shuffled the snakes. He put them in the middle of the enclosure. He placed individual pythons under different shelters to force them to go find each other.
Over and over, the snakes chose to pile up rather than coil alone.
When snakes left to explore the enclosure, they often left together. And though males tended to wander more than females, they always returned to the home base.
“That blew my mind,” Dr. Skinner said. “I was not expecting that from a snake I wasn’t expecting to be social.”
In fact, Dr. Miller said, the ball pythons were more social than garter snakes. The team’s past research has shown that garters can be surprisingly cliquish, with individual snakes showing clear preferences about who they spend time with.
The juvenile ball pythons, meanwhile, didn’t appear to care much about who they denned with. “They just wanted to be together all the time, in one shelter,” Dr. Skinner said.
No animal behaves quite the same in captivity as it does in the wild, said Vladimir Dinets, a specialist in reptile social behavior at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who did not participate in the study. But since wild snakes are difficult to study, research on social behavior in captive snakes is still useful.
“I’m kind of impressed at how meticulously they worked out the whole thing and how well they showed this,” Dr. Dinets said. “I tend to look for flaws in things I read, and I couldn’t find anything to pick on, here.”
The research team acknowledges that it’s possible that python friendliness is an artifact of captivity. But because ball pythons in the wild eat relatively large meals and often go for extended periods without dining, they may not actually compete with one another much, Dr. Miller said. They may simply leave communal dens when hungry, and return when full.
Ball pythons in captivity therefore might have been missing out on important social time. “They like doing it,” Dr. Skinner said.
The study’s finding underscores how much there is to learn, Dr. Miller said. The assumption that snakes are inherently solitary clearly needs further testing.
“Every snake species I’ve ever studied, they’re all very social,” Dr. Miller said. “And they prefer to be social when they’re given the choice.”
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