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

[Skiploder]

You mis quoted me I said "Ball Pythons do not climb trees in the wild and spend large amounts of time in those trees." They are not ment to be separate statements. They should be taken as one. My point was that they do climb opportunistically not as a rule. I fail to see an issue with my consistancy. Your last post was much better from a science stand point. It still tells us nothing about BPs.

You asked questions about thrasops - I expanded on what was going with my snakes.

As for ball pythons and an all-rodent diet - your guess is as good as mine.

There is a mountain of research out there that first covers normal blood panels form different species and how lipids change from a recently consumed meal up to two months into a fast.

There is also enough evidence out there on the dietary content of mice and rats that shows that their lipid levels may exceed those of avian, amphibian and reptilian prey. They is also evidence to show that these elevated levels result in systemic disease in snakes.

I've never seen any research on the long term effects of balls and I have no idea what their feeding + 56 days fast lipid panels look like. The fact that some people have successfully fed them an all rodent diet for decades would leave me to believe that they can metabolize the additional lipids in rodent prey fairly effectively.

Those quotes were taken from two separate posts a page or so apart.. It seemed to me that you were pretty adamant that they don't climb, and then relented when confronted with the study. If that wasn't the case, then so be it.