RHP's and radiation

[Coluber42]

There has been some research about what snakes can “see” with their heat pits, some done on pit vipers and some on pythons. Plus some on other reptiles’ mechanisms for detecting temperature differences. But not nearly as much as you’d want to be able to have any idea of what the snake really “sees”. At least in vipers (maybe pythons too, I might be conflating different studies?) the heat pits do connect to the visual areas of the brain, so maybe it really is like having an IR camera overlay on top of normal vision. They seem to operate on the basis of detecting temperature differences between things, such as an animal and its background. If you hunt warm-blooded prey in the dark, you are looking for things that are warmer than their background. If you hunt lizards (which thermoregulate) right after dusk in an area that gets very hot during the day, maybe you are looking for thigns that are cooler than their background.

And if you have good heat detectors all over your face, you can use them for more than just finding prey. You can also use them for helping you thermoregulate, because you can look around and find basking spots or refugia at the temperature you need. That’s probably how snakes’ infrared detection abilities originally evolved, because that’s hugely important to an ectothermic animal but it requires a lot less precision than using it to detect prey.

All that is to say - yes, your snake can “see” the heat panel. It’s probably not the same as having the light on all the time though. It can also “see” any other heat source you use even if it doesn’t produce visible light.

But it can make feeding potentially confusing, if you dangle a prey item in front of the RHP. If a ball python usually looks for a 100-degree rat in a 85-degree space, the rat is warmer than the background. If the 100-degree rat is in front of a 150-degree heat panel, it’s cooler than the background. So that can make it harder to target if the snake is used to looking for prey that’s warmer than its surroundings. But it’s easy enough to present the prey from the other side of the cage or whatever and then you don’t have to worry about it.