Vision of Ball Python Albino

[Mendel's Balls]

How would you test for that? I read that ball pythons, like many nocturnal reptiles, have pretty crappy vision to begin with and that they relied more on tracking heat sources when hunting or ambushing prey.

Crappy depends on your perspective...from an anthropogenic view yes they have crappy photoreception.....they cant see as many different colors as we can and cant see images as sharp as we can since they dont have many cone cells in their eyes.....

Furthermore, they also only have two types of cone cells while we have three..this allows our eyes to "cover" and absorb more of the colors on the "visible spectrum"

Cones are useful for day vision.....

Ball Pythons, however, have a higher density of rod cells in their eyes then we do...and rods are used for night vision....a rod can detect a single photon of light

See this 1999 Paper I just found from the Journal of Experimental Biology available free from PubMed Central for more info.

"The nocturnal habit of its primary prey makes it necessary for P. regius to be very active at night. Its retina, so heavily dominated by highly
sensitive rods, is ideally suited for either foraging or ambushing
in a dim light environment. Its relatively long rod outer
segments would be highly effective light traps, making it very
unlikely that a photon entering a rod along its longitudinal plane
would not be absorbed by the visual pigment. Similarly, its high
rod packing density decreases the likelihood that a photon
would pass between adjacent rods and remain unabsorbed. At
approximately 457 000 rodsmm-2, the rod packing density in
the retina of P. regius is similar to that of other nocturnal
creatures. For example, depending on the region surveyed, rod
packing density has been measured in the retina of the cat Felis
domesticus at 275 000–460 000 rodsmm-2 (Steinberg et al.,
1973), in the North American opossum Didelphis virginiana at
310 000–485 000 rodsmm-2 (Kolb and Wang, 1985) and in the
owl monkey Aotes trivirgatus at 216 000–478 000 rodsmm-2
(Ogden, 1975). Albino laboratory rats were found to have a rod
packing density of 374 000 rodsmm-2 by Mayhew and Astle
(1997) and 400 000 rodsmm-2 by Cone (1963), who found no
variation in density over the central two-thirds of the retina."


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Interestingly, the same group finds that while BPs have only two cones, one of the cones can absorb light in the UV range of the electromagnetic spectrum.....so maybe it's not so much that they have worse vision than us...they just have a different way of seeing....




As far as Albinism affecting vision in BP....I am starting to believe it doesnt have much of an effect...I dont know this for sure but from what I have been reading Albinism in humans (see http://www.knowlton.clara.net/family/Albinism/sight.htm) for the most part affects how much detail a human can see in a picture.....and WT BPs can see much detail to begin with