I only touched briefly on it here: Enrichment versus minimalist - #66 by t_h_wyman
I tried to have a rational conversation with him about this on a FB post but he refused to even listen to the point of pushing blatantly contradictory arguments…
He also blatantly misrepresents the conclusions of those sources.
I have read the paper in question and nowhere in the paper does the author claim that ball pythons are semi-arboreal. What is stated in the paper is that, based on his study of ball pythons within a specific biome-type (a forested area in the case of this study), males are more likely to exhibit arboreal behaviour than females.
The individual behind that video takes the paper, disregards vitally important factors like the actual physiology of these animals and the limited scope of environment that was studied, and then manipulates the conclusion of the paper to conflate what was actually found.
As an analogy of what the paper is saying - If I make the statement that, when discussing football in Baltimore, men are more likely than women to be Ravens fans. I come to this conclusion because 1) Statistically, men are likely than women to prefer football and 2) In Baltimore, the football team is the Ravens so there will be hometown pride. A very logical and coherent argument
Using that same analogy, the person responsible for this video took the statement of “when discussing football in Baltimore, men are more likely than women to be Ravens fans” and conflated it to “Everyone in the US is a Ravens fan”
Ball pythons, when presented with some type of climbable surface, will certainly make opportunistic use of it, especially when it comes to acquisition of prey. However, it is only an opportunistic behaviour, it is not a fundamental lifestyle behaviour that you find in a species that is verifiable semi-arboreal