Are ball pythons even [I]slightly[/I] arboreal?

[Skiploder]

Ball Pythons do not climb trees in the wild

I would just add that its my understanding that in the wild juvenile BP and small males are more likely to climb trees.

You fail at science.

...and you are failing at consistency. Tell you what - let's do away with the catty little swipes. I always love a good debate and enjoy reading your posts, but I am really not interested in snark right now.

There have been recent papers written on the subject of diet related health issues and some of our own native north american snakes.

I'll save you the trouble of a lengthy Google search and having to fork over $35 to purchase the pdfs of the research and instead focus on what is going on with my animals.

Studies have previously been done on using domestic mice as a prey source for captive omni/carnivores. What these studies have shown is that mice contained cholesterol levels that exceeded other prey sources and that the intake of excessive levels led to eye and tissue abnormalities.

It was also discovered that as the intake of dietary polyunsaturated fatty acids increases, the dietary requirement for vitamin E increases. Researchers concluded that it is important that lipid profiles of feeder mice therefore be known and considered when examining captive animal diets.

As the only person I know keeping and breeding thrasops in the US, I actually forked over a lot of money to have tests done on three of my older thrasops afflicted with both fatty deposits and lipid keratopathy. These were compared to my younger and middle aged animals who are being raised on a natural prey model diet.

What we are finding is that the offspring of animals affected with corneal deposits probably won't develop the disease. At the age of seven, all of my original, unrelated group was developing corneal deposits to some degree or another. At roughly the same age, an unrelated WC group is clear.

The blood cholesterol level of my older pair is off the chart. The blood cholesterol level of my reptile and avian fed +/-7 year olds and my neonates is relatively equal.

So my vet and our local university, are pretty much sure that thrasops have an issue with metabolizing lipids and subsequently processing high fat diets.

In short, they aren't metabolizing them, and corneal opacity and lipid deposits on the body are the end result.