A few hours post water-change! Last Friday I spent some time picking out dead leaves and clipping off damaged ones. I still got some anubias in the back that need a few damaged leaves clipped, but I'll save that for next weekend.
This paper reaffirms what we already knew: typical breeder-style rack systems are not an ethical way to house ball pythons. It’s a behavioral comparison of 35 ball pythons housed in typical barren racks and then larger, well furnished terrariums. In the terrariums, they showed a variety of natural behaviors like climbing and basking, whereas in the rack this was obviously not the case.
@wheremyscalesslither Heather, have you seen this yet?
Considering animal welfare, animals should be kept in animal-appropriate and stress-free housing conditions in all circumstances. To assure
I’m off work so I thought I’d go through and pull some interesting excerpts, though I really recommend reading the whole thing.
First off, this is a preprint and not yet a peer reviewed article, so I imagine the officially published version may be pretty edited, but methodology and results speak for themselves. If this gets peer reviewed and published I will share that version as well!
This study sought to compare behaviors performed by ball pythons in typical barren rack systems versus in naturalistic terraria. 35 ball pythons of various sex, age, and morph were housed in racks for a minimum of 8 weeks, and then transferred to naturalistic terrariums.Â
(Continued under the cut)
The rack bins were 70x40x16cm and heated with heat mats. The snakes were offered newspaper substrate, a hiding place, and a water dish.
The terrariums were 3 different sizes depending on the length of the snake- 100x50x50cm, 120x60x60cm, and 150x80x80cm. For my fellow americans, the smallest terrarium was just over 3.25 feet long and the largest just under 5 feet. The medium size is just about 4x2x2 feet, which is the commonly recommended “enriched minimum” for ball pythons. They were provided with fluorescent and UVB lighting, 10-35cm of soil mix, a hiding place, an elevated basking platform, a water dish, a live plant, and “natural” furnishings.
A camera was installed in each setup, switched off for 5 days, and then on for 5 consecutive days during which behavior was recorded. Behavior was documented in 10 minute intervals
Some interesting things to note:
-Climbing, basking, burrowing, and bathing behaviors were not observed in the rack systems at all. The first three are obvious, as an animal with nothing to climb, bask under, or burrow into will not perform such behaviors, but interesting that they did not bathe either, despite having a water dish, and bathing occurring 0.9% of the time in the vivs. This pdf does not include photos of either the rack or the viv setups, so I can only guess that this may be due to the rack water vessels not being large enough to facilitate soaking? Not sure, but I thought that was interesting.
-The remaining three behaviors mentioned above- climbing, basking, and burrowing- occupied a combined ~18.07% of the snakes’ time in the vivs. That’s a pretty big chunk of the day!
-In the racks, they spent a little over 0.5% of their time exploring the camera, but were not observed to do so at all in the vivs. It’s possible that in the vivs they did not notice the camera as much due to their setups being more visually interesting and enriching, or they could have been habituated to the presence of the camera during their time in the rack.
-In the racks, 11.59% of the time was spent pushing against the side or top of the setup. In the vivs, this goes down drastically to only 0.04%. One could argue that this is due to the top being less accessible in the taller vivs, but this behavior was also counted when the snakes pushed against the side of the setups, so I don’t see that as a valid argument.Â
-In the vivs, significantly less time (33.33%) was spent in the hiding place than in the racks (53.9%). About the same amount of time was spent outside the hide coiled up, but in the vivs more time was spent outside the hide stretched out (18.64% vs 14.64%). At the least this refutes the idea that ball pythons in large naturalistic terrariums are more stressed than in rack systems- a stressed ball python would spend more time hiding, not less.Â
-The albino ball pythons still basked! Though much less than the non-albinos, averaging 10min/day rather than 144min/day. Albino reptiles are more sensitive to light, however they may also be more efficient at absorbing what they need for d3 synthesis than non albinos, so it somewhat evens out, though the authors question if this severe a restriction of a common behavior may render albino morphs unethical to breed. Something for further research! The non-albinos average nearly 2.5 hours a day basking, which flies in the face of the common thought that ball pythons are photophobic and do not use UVB.
-The researchers note that in a preliminary study, basking spots without UVB were used much less than basking spots with UVB. Same point as above, this goes to show ball pythons seek out UVB exposure.Â
-They also noted a regular daily rhythm, with the ball pythons going to the basking spot to warm up in the morning, followed by an active period, a resting period, and then returning to the basking spot before the UVB turned off to warm up again before another active period.Â
In conclusion, “A terrarium must be adapted to the needs of the housed individual. For instance, the need for protection in juvenile snakes should be met with multiple hiding places and many structural elements, such as dense vegetation. The terrarium dimensions alone cannot be used to determine if a terrarium is appropriate for housing a ball python. An unstructured, large terrarium in which the animal-appropriate needs are not met is not acceptable. The terrarium should contain several hiding places, possibilities for climbing, substrate for burrowing, a large enough water basin that the snake can use for bathing, and a basking spot with UV light. The natural needs of the ball python are known and thus must be met.”
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