Red Lights and Ball Python Night Vision?

[KingWheatley]

Before you go poking at her eye or whatever..

Who would poke any animal in the eye to test vision?? Eye caps or no, that's not even remotely scientific...

If I wanted to test her vision, I'd take an object of sorts and wiggle it around. Problem is that anything that is a different smell/temperature would ruin that experiment...

Perhaps a shadow test, first? If she sees movement and reacts, then it can be confirmed she is not 100% blind at least.

I'm not going to do this. Speaking theoretically.


Herp Derp

[KingWheatley]

Where is your light located?...

In this instance it was behind him. I've since moved it over a water bowl but I'm about to move it back because it messes with the ambient temperature much more than the original light did.



Herp Derp

[Sauzo]

BPs aren't sight hunters. They hunt by heat signatures. They don't have the best sight. And my snakes will miss here and there. It's why you use tongs to feed them and not hang them with your hand.

[KingWheatley]

It's why you use tongs to feed them and not hang them with your hand.

I have always used tongs to feed Cookie.


Herp Derp

[KingWheatley]

In case anyone is interested in a lightly humorous video of the event....


Herp Derp

[Coluber42]

This is a video that someone posted to the "general herp" forum awhile ago, of a professor discussing work his lab has been doing studying snakes' infrared sensing abilities. It's longish, but really fascinating and informative. One of the tests they did was with copperheads where they put the snakes in a completely dark box with a moving target that was warmer than the background and tracked how the snakes followed the movement of the target, which they did very effectively. Then they used a target that was cooler than the background, and the snakes moved their heads OPPOSITE to the movement of the target. In other words, they fixated on the warmer thing - the background when the target was cooler, and the target when it was warmer. Obviously this is a different snake and a different setting, but I think it may well be applicable. If you are dangling a 75 degree mouse and there is a heat lamp in the background, the snake is not likely to aim for the cooler target. It seems a little dumb on the snake's part, but it does make sense for an animal that hunts a warm blooded prey at night; how many scenarios can you think of where a rat would be cooler than things in the background?

The video also describes experiments they did with burmese pythons to test how small of differences in temperature they could detect. It involved teaching them to push a button for a food reward... which required getting them to eat meals of a bazillion mice in a row, instead of one big prey! Pretty incredible. What's also incredible is that they don't actually know how sensitive the snakes' IR sense is, because they ran up against the precision of their equipment first.

Anyway, it's totally cool and worth the half an hour.