SCIENCE LAB SPECIAL : SOCIAL SNAKES

 

BALL PYTHONS show researchers they like  their lives intertwined. 

The ball python does not seem like a snake with hidden depths. A small African python, it is the second most popular pet reptile in the world, beloved fortis rich colors, intricate patterns and docile temper. It is easily bred and almost always kept alone.

'' People don't think of certain snakes as social at all, especially in the reptile hobby,'' said Morgan Skinner, a quantitative ecologist who studied at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. '' And they tend to keep them alone or isolated because of these preconceptions.''

But in a study published recently in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, Dr. Skinner and his colleagues show that ball pythons are much more cuddly with one another than anyone had guessed.

The study of snake social behavior has been undergoing a renaissance over the past few years, said Noam Miller, who is an author on the paper and also at Wilfrid Laurier. Researchers have tended to focus on garter snakes and rattlesnakes, both of which give birth to live young, spend winters together massed in dens and form '' friendships '' during active seasons.

But while working on his doctorate in Dr. Miller's lab, Dr Skinner began wondering how snakes not known to be social interacted with one another.

Because ball pythons lay eggs, rather than having live births and have no need to hibernate, they seemed like the perfect study candidate.

In 2030, Dr. Skinner and his colleague Tamara Kampan placed a mixed-sex group of six pythons for 10days in a large enclosure - one with enough plastic shelters for each snake - and left a camera running.

To Dr. Skinner's shock, all six snakes quickly squeezed together in the same shelter and spent over 60 percent of their time together. Assuming that all of the snakes had simply liked something about that specific shelter, the team removed it. But after some initial confusion, the snakes chose another home base in which to curl up together.

As the team repeated the experiment over the next few years - with five different cohorts of young  pythons - the pattern held. Twice a day, Dr. Skinner came in and shuffled the snakes. He put them in the middle of the enclosure. He placed individual pythons under different shelters to force them to go find one another.

Over and over, the snakes chose to pile up, rather than coil alone.

'' That blew my mind,'' Dr. Skinner said. I was not expecting that from a snake I wasn't expecting to be social.''

In fact, Dr. Miller said, the ball pythons were more social than garter snakes. The team's past research has shown that garters can be surprisingly cliquish, with individual snakes showing clear preferences about whom they spend time with.

The juvenile ball pythons, however, didn't appear to care much whom they denned with. '' They just wanted to be together all the time, in one shelter,'' Dr. Skinner said. [ Asher Elbein ]