Quote Originally Posted by XIronMaidenOpheliaX View Post
Because I heard that they are not arboreal.
I don't understand why everyone says they're ground-dwelling only.
What do they do when you're handling them? They climb. What do they do when there are branches provided? They climb.
When I was doing research on them before getting mine, I read something somewhere that someone was bathing his ball python and left for two seconds for whatever reason. When he returned, the snake was on the shower curtain rod. The same writer said in the same article that ball pythons do not climb at all, and are only ground-dwelling. I was thinking, "That makes no logical sense; they have to climb in order to be on a curtain rod!"
A study from a few years ago found that the majority of wild ball pythons were in trees. Only females that were laying eggs were on the ground. They kind of have to climb in order to be in a tree.
We always hear that ball pythons are on everything, yet that they are not arboreal.
It's so weird. They love to climb, and I don't understand why we're all told otherwise. I'd say they are semi-arboreal. They like the ground, but they also love to be above-ground. The problem is that we end up not providing branches for them, because we're told that they won't use them.
Personally, I think breeders wouldn't have a clue about it anyway, since the majority of them use plastic tubs. You can't accurately moniter their behavior in these, so how can they say what they do and what they don't do? They really can't, and it's the breeders that tell us ball pythons are ground-dwelling.
How this makes sense anyway, I don't know. Every other python species climbs. Why not these guys?