On Ball Python Cohabitation

I do have reason to believe that they are not 100% solitary creatures, my boyfriend and I have 2 baby ball pythons that are both relatively a year or younger. We got our male (who was labeled as a pastel ghost when we found him) a little under 6 months ago from a pet store as a rescue since he wouldn’t eat and it was against store policy to feed live so when we took him home we tried feeding him live and he ate for the first time in roughly 3 months. About a month or 2 after we got our male we went to a reptile expo where we bought our female (a vpi axanthic 50% het albino). She had been eating rats prior to us getting her but she went on strike because we couldn’t get her any live rats in town, so we had to start making trips 1-2 hours away to get her food weekly (she did start eating after about 5 weeks of us having her). Before we could get her food though she was always trying to escape from her enclosure and would try to be at the top as best as she could, we decided to put her in with our male to see if that would improve anything since we plan on breeding later on and hope to breed them together in the future. We noticed after about a week or 2 they would cuddle up with each other both in their enclosure and when we had them out and be in the same hide, there was never really a problem with them interacting because our male had already seemed to fall in love with her from just seeing a picture of her before we got her. We introduced them shortly after her quarantine period ended and she was a little hesitant at first towards him but quickly opened up to him. We still have them in the same enclosure and I think her being in the same enclosure as him helped her get used to us since he would spend time with us and she no longer tries to escape. We have them in a 40 gallon where they have plenty of space to be alone if they wish but they still choose to be together majority of the time and we plan on putting them in a larger enclosure as they grow older. (Below this are pictures of both of them together, the lighter is our male while our female is the darker of the 2)






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