BP Climbing like a tree python

[redshepherd]

Here's just one example with a link to the study from this very forum, years ago, for those interested in learning new information.

"Three royal pythons were found outside of burrows. They were all males. Number 22 was in a mango tree, 26 was in open grassland, and 98 was found in a trench. Two other males (numbers 32 and 75) vomited rodents after capture, indicating that some males are active and feeding during the dry season."

http://ec.europa.eu/environment/cite...thon_ghana.pdf

Page 11 Dr Stefan GORZULA Consultant, CITES Secretariat.

Here's the video if you want to buy it and check it out.

http://www.stevegorzulapresents.com/

They're not actually studying them in the same sense that a professionally-produced nature documentary would be studying them, however--they're just counting animals for the CITES survey. So the "territories of an acre each" is really just based on density.

In order to make the counting easier, they do the surveys during the middle of the day, when the pythons are asleep in their burrows. The scientest are not out filming the snakes' behavior at night, when they're more likely to be awake and moving around. Nothing like that, unfortunately.

So there's no video clips of them actively hunting or climbing trees. So my assertion that ball pythons climb in the wild is solely based on the fact that there ARE trees and low bushes in the daytime shots, and on the fact that MY snakes would sure as heck be climbing and falling out of those things on a regular basis, if their behavior during handling time and escape attempts is anything to judge by....

No one is calling them semi-arboreal. Their feeding behavior clearly indicates that they are semi-arboreal in terms of hunting for prey. While that alone doesn't make them arboreal or even semi-arboreal, it does mean that they have successfully adapted to taking to the trees to hunt prey.