Substrate flows air, it presents a less thermally efficient surface than something like skin that does not allow for airflow. Body heat will be retained more efficiently, especially if the snake it’s laying on is a similar temperature.
5 Likes
Yes and no, I think…
The air has the highest thermal efficiency and is hottest closest to surface - there aren’t cooling crosswinds in racks. For the animal to be meaningfully hotter than this rising air, it would have to generate its own heat through metabolic process. But it doesn’t - its heat production is negligible since it’s cold blooded. It can totally reach equilibrium with the surrounding environment, and it does have high internal ‘resistance’ so it can trap the warmest environmental temp across some of its body. If you check your racks you’ll probably find plenty of snakes that are close to the warm spot temp. But also many less, and none meaningfully above (I just measured ~30 racks to be sure).
But there was a divider here, so presumably a very similar warm spot with warm air rising up and no other snake. Let’s even say a degree or two less 'cause there’s a thicker packing of coco husk. Then the argument becomes ‘well, the ball python will endure considerable social stress to gain at best 2 degrees of body temp.’
And I don’t really believe that’s true, if the social stress is anything beyond negligible. Unless they’re in shed, my snakes hardly even stay on warmest spots in the mid-80’s…they adjust and explore with pretty high variance. Yet they ALWAYS find each other when cohabbing, divider or not.
5 Likes
In this rack of clutchmates, the three snakes snuggled on the left are 82 degrees. The empty spot on the right is 86. The normal was more snuggled up before I spooked 'em and ran to grab my temp gun. Usually 3-4 of 5 are together at any given time, with the others either exploring or resting solo/paired. I see this all day every day.
6 Likes
Definitely agree with you @ballornothing. I have noticed similar results when my heating elements are off. The body of the said Snake was hotter and stayed warmer then the substrate around it and even the coco below it.
2 Likes
Every time you open the door or turn on a (central heat/air system) to a room in a home it depressurizes the room causing air flow. Even without that, the stack effect is drawing low pressure air through your home. Unless you have a room/home that was addressed during construction by a home performance contractor, your house and every room in breathes through the stack effect. Air moves in your room all the time. It’s drawn in from crawl spaces, under exterior wall sub plates, through wire tracts in interior walls, and it moves on into the attic. Unless you’ve measured and eliminated air flow during construction, the low pressure air that’s drawn in or exists closer to the floor will seek, meet, and mix the higher pressure air that exists at the roof line or in the attic itself.
5 Likes
Very well said.
1 Like
I initially thought I disagreed to some degree with the stack effect argument, since in this system the cold air must enter from the top (inverse traditional buildings). But I think the same principle does loosely hold here, where the pressure differential formed by the heating element in aggregate draws cooler air from the top/front of the rack. My only thought here is that I would still expect a pretty consistent thermal gradient - there’s low perturbation at the husk surface given the thin and static opening at the top.
I again went through and measured spot + snake temperatures in every rack I own. I don’t see any empirical evidence of the claim that snakes can be meaningfully warmer than the substrate below. After all, they are also touching that colder air sweeping in.
But even if I did, I would still maintain the far more central part of my argument - that if a python is overwhelmingly prone to cohab for a few degrees of incremental warmth, given the low metabolic needs sans digestion, the stress must be pretty negligible at worst.
6 Likes
It might not be much if you heat source is still on. The difference I had observed was the efficiency the snake’s body held heat compared to the coco. But still, at least for me, I noticed a 1/2 - 1 degree difference with the heating element on.
4 Likes
Yeah I would totally expect the snake to hold heat longer than the substrate/air if the tape is turned off.
2 Likes
So I think what @ballornothing is trying to say is, that because of that difference being present. The choice is to stay at a more consistent temp (lack of downtime no matter how small) by laying on the other snake because it’s body holds heat more efficiently then coco.
Let me know if that is what you are trying to say @ballornothing.
4 Likes
Yeah I can kinda see that but these thermometer systems are pulsing, at least in my racks I don’t see the surface temperature vary much intraday. And it’s still true in most of my measurements that the snakes are a few degrees colder than the warm strip of husk (roughly seems like 1/3 are similar) 
1 Like
I’m not against your position, just speaking from my experience/observations to add to the conversation.
It may simply be that it desires the lack of draft from below Belly scales have to be less efficient than the rest at keeping the metaphorical door closed.
As you’ve considered, each tub is a micro climate and the heat strip drives pressure conditions within the environment. Although I’m sure during high delta T conditions between your room and exterior ambient, the stack effect of your home will come into play and potentially multiply the draw above and beyond the microclimate in the tub.
As interested as you are in this project, I suggest investing in a smart phone capable IR camera. They’re much more informative/accurate than a temp gun and the FLIR units are under $200. No substitute for more data. I use my to check heat sources and gradients when time allows, and you get a much clearer picture of the situation.
My ‘issue’ with the idea of this behavior being a positive social interaction, is that breeding pairs almost never do this. They lay together, not one directly on top of other. I can’t reach an understanding in my mind of why one would lay atop the other beyond thermoregulation or dominance behavior considering mating animals don’t typically show this behavior. What social interaction is more important in the animal kingdom than mating?
7 Likes
An acoustic commercial ceiling with displaced insulation.
Heat leakage at an exterior wall (due in part to the stack effect) of a home without air sealing and with underperforming insulation.
Improperly insulated knee walls bleeding attic heat into a room with a vaulted ceiling
3 Likes
I appreciate that. It often feels like people come into this thread and flippantly undermine the pretty extraordinary amount of work and thought that’s gone into my position with no acknowledgement of even the possibility of validity in these arguments. If my position is proven right in time, it will have overcome a whole lot of resistance to the ideas.
The IR cam is a great idea.
Another reason that I don’t really buy the draft chill argument is my picture above. If incremental warmth was the goal, as I mentioned there was a 4 degree hotter spot just to the right with no other snakes. 0/5 snakes chose to take that space. Perhaps it’s just the desire to minimize airflow, but in the absence of incremental warmth I think that’s really a stretch. BUT even if it’s true, then this is their preference - and the argument for cohabitation stands on that anyway!
On mating, I think it’s really hard to draw many conclusions from snakes that have been kept in isolation their entire lives. I’ve seen plenty of anecdotes of people keeping heterosexual pairs together for life, and in my own breeding I’ve found a range of behavior. I’ve observed avoidance, particularly when the female doesn’t want to breed. Of course I separate when I observe this. But I’ve also seen the reverse, where the snakes breed then seem very comfortable snuggling in a rack. I have two snakes together right now that exhibit this, and I’ve felt little need to rush in and separate them because the duty is done - they are totally fine together.
I also misidentified the sex of an adult purchase and cohabbed a heterosexual pair on accident. The only way I noticed is that I caught them breeding months in - they otherwise acted just like the other cohabs! I have some great videos of their behaviors together that I’ll try to post.
5 Likes
My gf and I always loved the interaction between these two - they always chose to snuggle up, and seemed to have a lot of shared curiosity. One day I left their shared tub a little cracked, and we saw this exploration and observation behavior. I took a few videos along the way. It later turned out the Ivory was a male, and the juvenile OD/Blade laid a small clutch of viable eggs from their time cohabbing.
These videos again show 0% stress - only curiosity and comfort together.
4 Likes
I’ve been thinking about this for a while and while you’ve convinced me that it’s possible (for an experienced and very observant owner), I’m still not convinced that it’s beneficial (I still think it does more harm than good). There are a few key points that I would still need convinced to accept this idea.
In the wild ball pythons can be found together but are they often found together? No, many other social animals (eg. wolves, birds, and ants) are often found together and are biologically evolved to live together. For example some birds (like geese) rely on others to migrate. Most birds rely on other birds for protection and finding food. Ants rely on other ants to do different jobs. Wolves rely on other wolves for help raising cubs and hunting. In ball pythons there are no biological reasons why they need to work together, so why would they want to be together? If an animal has no beneficial reason to be close to other why would they feel the need to both be close to each other? Evolution would remove that want in favor for bare necessities. So if they aren’t usually together in the wild why should we force them to be together in a tiny enclosure?
Another point is resource guarding. It is very difficult to prove things one way or another, but do both snakes want to be close to each other at the exact same time? Sometimes one might go close to the other and vice versa a different time. But at the same time do they both want to be close to each other? If you put them both in an open area (not a confined enclosure where they have very limited freedom) do they both stay close to each other? If snake #1 moves then snake #2 might follow it. But if snake #2 moves 30 seconds later will snake #1 follow it?
This one is the biggest for me and likely the one that has been and will prevent people from cohabitating unless proven. Does cohabitation actually benefit the snakes? There are plenty of reasons not to cohabitate (eg. the unexpected time where one snake might eat the other for no apparent reason). If you have 4 snakes and 3 enclosures and rotate them around so there is always 2 together and 2 alone in every combination will the pairs consistently do better? Now, how do you measure how happy a snake is? Can it be determined by how consistently it eats, how well it can be handled, or something else?
If these were all proven and it was decided that snakes aren’t stressed and it is beneficial to them then I and many other people would be more open to the idea.
7 Likes
What if I asked for the same burden of proof the other way - given almost all animals benefit from intra-species social interaction, and the neurochemical profile of snakes also includes endorphins and oxytocin (especially relevant since snakes are functionally a long muscle), and ball pythons in particular seem to trend towards contact when cohabitated…can you give me overwhelming evidence that this interaction is not positive?
I think the answer is HARD no - I would bet house and home that no one could produce this evidence if they tried for this species. Because per my many experiments they seem chill af and they do, I am certain, trend towards contact. Overwhelmingly. Like 90% of the time among my 50 ball pythons, with 5% of observations allocated to ‘indifference’ and 5% to ‘avoidance’ (mostly breeding behavior as described earlier, but also what I might call ‘conscious time apart’).
And I really think there’s plenty of reason to presume one angle over the other - on the one hand you have like, most of nature, everything we understand about neurochemistry and stress reduction, and all my observations…and on the other, one poorly understood forum picture, some citations in an old book, and a veritable ton of social pressure driving strong subscription to environmentally constrained observations that to me just seems to form an enormous mote of conventional wisdom.
I want to mention of something else that I haven’t noted yet - I don’t think this behavior necessarily extends ipso facto to all snake interactions. I’m much less confident in cross-species or Boidae. I don’t have enough animals of other species to make any strong claims yet, but I’ve started experimenting and I think the prelim results are faaar less clear. So far my few boas seem to prefer to be alone, and I keep them that way as a result.
12 Likes
While almost all animals benefit, very few reptile species benefit. Most reptiles are basic and don’t exhibit complex behaviors, especially not towards other reptiles.
All it takes for me to not cohabitate is the very small risk of cannibalism or feeding mistakes (even if they’re fed separately one might accidently eat the other snake). I’m also not going to risk forcing them into a small enclosure if they don’t benefit from being together.
I would actually love to try this but I don’t have ball pythons or the money to experiment. Someday I would like to try this.
4 Likes
This was discussed way earlier in thread - garter snakes are much simpler but are well understood for their social behavior. Part of my argument is that we’re drastically simplifying the animal - they have relatively large and evolved brains compared to many animals that are accepted as social.
Many social animals also exhibit very outlier cannibalism - humans, dogs, and cats included. If you put two starving dogs into a room together, one of them likely ends up dead. And domesticated animals that otherwise cohabitate fine often fight over food.
To me it’s not really about eliminating risk, but rather understanding the risks and associated tradeoffs much more clearly. I’ve sampled enough interactions over these two years to feel really confident in negligible risk and meaningful gain, as measured by their choice, so long as they are fed separately. Certainly the risk is not commiserate to the appalled reactions that I often see online.
I do agree on space, and I just view it as another need to balance - my clutch fam babies for example are getting large enough to justify splitting into two or three tubs.
10 Likes