Nope, wouldn’t swear to it. It was several years back, when we watched animal shows with the kids. I wouldn’t be surprised if the narrator got it wrong or I misremembered. But, the memory in my head, which is always questionable with my advancing senility, looks like a children’s.
Cool. That does look remarkably like a children’s. The question here is did the show get it right and am I remembering right. We all know how amazingly accurate some of those “informative” shows can be, and how good our memories are. It was a neat bit though, watching the snake hang down into the flight path of the bats exiting the cave and grabbing and wrapping one that made contact in the mad rush. Why it stuck in my head…
I would guess your memory might be in err here. I know oenpelli have been documented eating bats on numerous occasions. It was accounting for that behaviour that helped the MPR crew find one in the wild.
Probably right. I went down the Google rabbit Warren abit today. I didn’t find the clip. But there was a lot of pictures and clips of carpets eating bats, and some of spotted pythons. I didn’t find anything with children’s. So, I’m perfectly willing to concede, my bad memory.
But cool clips nonetheless, it’s a neat behavior. And note that it’s repeated on several continents by several different species, so it must be a good survival strategy, there are even insects that do it. Fascinating.
Childrens pythons have been known to consume bats. They will hang from the roofs of small caves and catch them. This is recorded in detail in a book Titled , I believe, snakes of Australia.
This is an old post, but yes - they are excellent climbers for being considered a terrestrial snake. I keep my juvenile Wheatbelt Stimson’s variety in an oversized arboreal bioactive enclosure with several ledges and hides and it has amazed me with its climbing ability. It can navigate absolutely any branch. In the wild they do pursue prey into trees, and as another said here - have even hung from cave ceilings to catch bats.
This should not be surprising. Antaresia is a sister clade to Morelia, which includes Carpet pythons and Green Tree Pythons. It is thought that Australian pythons all descended from a modestly-sized ecosystem generalist that had good climbing capabilities. Antaresia branched off first and shrank. Morelia went more arboreal - and to the extreme with GTPs.
This is quite interesting @rcreek! Is the Stimson in the pics yours per chance? Nice photo of you as well!