Quote Originally Posted by iceman25
I thought they are opportunistic in the wild and would eat something already dead. Is that true or is it bad information floating around?
I have never read anything that suggested that ball pythons will eat dead prey in the wild.

Their primary resource for hunting is heat and they seem to be tuned in to the heat signature given off by living creatures. Also, they are certainly ambush predators as opposed to hunters, so it's unlikely that they would ever go out in search of dead prey.

I think if the timing was right for a wild ball python and it was traveling, hungry, and came across a freshly dead animal that's heat signature was still similar enough to a living prey item that the snake found it interesting that it could certainly eat it, but that would really be the exception, not the rule in my opinion and in reality, the ball python still wouldn't really know it was eating dead prey.

-adam