How has the BP evolved within captivity?

[Jerhart]

....No matter what it is, school, work, reptiles, anything...I do my best thinking in the shower.

Today I took a real long shower as I really got to thinking...how have we affected the evolution of the Ball Python in captivity?

See if you can follow me...I am going to go out on a limb and say very few of us mimic the African environment to a 'T'. The daylight cycle, temperature fluctuation during the seasons, the rainy season/dry season, and so on. Also wild BP's often carry various internal and external parasites as due the prey they feed upon.

Now we have taken these animals out of the wild, take them to the vet and get them all cleaned up. We say you should have warm spot of 'this', and a cooler spot of 'that'. Try to maintain a humidity of at least 'this' and if you want to breed 'cycle' your females. So many of us keep our animals within these general 'guidelines.'

Now take a CB animal perhaps an f10 animal and compare it to an f2 animal or an CB animal from WC adults. Has the f10 animal become more adapt to our general guidelines of housing? How would they react to external and internal parasites when we feed them lab rats and mice? Does their immune system weaken against these parasites since they do not encounter them?

Is this making sense? I am not trying to compare WC to a CB...but the way we may have possibly evolved the species by keeping generations of them in a very general environment? Could a cb f10 animal survive in the wild? Has that same animal become more immune to diseases in captivity we may not be aware of?

Oh and I am not talking about morphs and color patters because we obviously have been tinkering with that.

But 20 years down the road...is a CB F20 animal going to be almost a subspecies of a wild animal from Africa? Their taxonomy will be the same...but will the animal have evolved so much to adapt and make up for our mistakes in our husbandry that they would not be able to make it in Africa?

I dont know...like I said, I had a long shower and was going back and forth thinking about this.

Oh and the irony with myself and this post is that I went to school in Kansas for my K-12.....ha take that Kansas Board of Education!

Thanks all for reading!

[BallPythons9]

I have no clue, but that's an interesting thought.

[SnM_Man]

Dude ... lay off the jamaican hotbox showers !!! lol ... i doubt that BPs would "evolve" inside 20-30 generations of captivity, but most certainly would loose their ability to fight of specific bugs found in the wild, and if said cbs were fed F/T continiously through out there lives they could also potentialy loose there desire to hunt or the hunting skills altogether... dont forget it took thousands of years and countless generations to domesticate wolfs into mans best friend lol

[Sophiax]

This has crossed my mind as well... it's an interesting thought exercise, even though we probably wouldn't know for a long time to come, should humanity survive itself long enough to 'domesticate' ball pythons!

I think that snakes are so instinctual that even after many generations into captive breeding, they would do okay in the wild, except maybe the immune system issue. They're not like bears or chimps or whatever, who don't socialize properly. It's hard to un-wire millions of years of clean, simple hunting instinct...

[Jerhart]

I agree it would take a very long time for this process to become very noticeable...I just wanted to see if anyone has ever thought about it...how we may be evolving the snakes and not realize it.

[Oxylepy]

The generic adaptations picked up by an animal through it's enviroment would probably be true for a ball python.

A protozoan kept in increasing levels of alcohol through various generations will be able to survive in that situation very well, but when put back into a normal state will quickly revert back to it's original state. Similar to the snakes and the temperatures in which they can be kept. A wild caught snake may be less likely to handle a temperature range which a captive bred snake may be used to, but a captive bred snake may very well be able to be placed into a wild environment (Africa) and survive quite well, it's offspring being the same as the wild caught in all except possibly colour.

However we have created some captive traits that did not exist in the wild, specifically some of the morphs which were not exported from Africa and arose in captivity. Also they have probably adapted to having a more stable, although lower temperature than they would be exposed to in the wild. In other words they would not be exposed to the various changes in temperature that they would experience in Africa as day turns to night, summer turns to winter, etc. We keep them at an almost constant state through their entire lives.

As for other changes that have been produced in them I don't know of many. Although we have bred together parents with their offspring or brother and sister through many generations, this could have caused all sorts of genetic mutations through time, such as the kink that happens in Orange Ghosts (is that the correct snake or not? I can't remember which has the kink).

Other than minor changes I don't know of anything else, we have certainly not created a new species from the wild caught animals and any "evolutions" that may have happened are Micro-evolutions, not Macro. In fact there is no proof for macro-evolution aside from guesswork, it's still theoretical as we have never actually recorded a new species being formed from a pre-existing species (aka we have no animals that we have intentionally genetically isolated to the point where they can no longer produce fertile offspring with the animal that we have made them from).