....No matter what it is, school, work, reptiles, anything...I do my best thinking in the shower.
Today I took a real long shower as I really got to thinking...how have we affected the evolution of the Ball Python in captivity?
See if you can follow me...I am going to go out on a limb and say very few of us mimic the African environment to a 'T'. The daylight cycle, temperature fluctuation during the seasons, the rainy season/dry season, and so on. Also wild BP's often carry various internal and external parasites as due the prey they feed upon.
Now we have taken these animals out of the wild, take them to the vet and get them all cleaned up. We say you should have warm spot of 'this', and a cooler spot of 'that'. Try to maintain a humidity of at least 'this' and if you want to breed 'cycle' your females. So many of us keep our animals within these general 'guidelines.'
Now take a CB animal perhaps an f10 animal and compare it to an f2 animal or an CB animal from WC adults. Has the f10 animal become more adapt to our general guidelines of housing? How would they react to external and internal parasites when we feed them lab rats and mice? Does their immune system weaken against these parasites since they do not encounter them?
Is this making sense? I am not trying to compare WC to a CB...but the way we may have possibly evolved the species by keeping generations of them in a very general environment? Could a cb f10 animal survive in the wild? Has that same animal become more immune to diseases in captivity we may not be aware of?
Oh and I am not talking about morphs and color patters because we obviously have been tinkering with that.
But 20 years down the road...is a CB F20 animal going to be almost a subspecies of a wild animal from Africa? Their taxonomy will be the same...but will the animal have evolved so much to adapt and make up for our mistakes in our husbandrythat they would not be able to make it in Africa?
I dont know...like I said, I had a long shower and was going back and forth thinking about this.
Oh and the irony with myself and this post is that I went to school in Kansas for my K-12.....ha take that Kansas Board of Education!
Thanks all for reading!![]()