6/11/2023 0 Comments Are ball pythons nocturnalThese facilities hatch the eggs and raise the baby snakes until they are ready for shipment to North America or Europe. Of course, even morphs have African origins.īall python hunters take gravid (“pregnant”) females and eggs to snake ranches. Then in 1992, the first albino ball pythons went on sale.īreeders outside of Africa quickly learned how to breed morphs in a tremendous variety of patterns and colors, and morphs became much more popular, and expensive, than ball pythons caught in Africa. Ball Python Morphs Born in the USAīefore the early 1990s, ball pythons were considered easy to take care of, but not particularly interesting. Their skin is used for making leather, and they are used in traditional medicine.Īs a result, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) listed ball pythons as “near threatened.”īut the brisk trade in ball python morphs, raised by breeders mostly in the US state of Florida, is reducing the pressure on ball pythons in Africa. Part of the reason ball pythons are harder to find in Africa than they used to be is that they aren’t pets in Africa.īall pythons are eaten as bushmeat. Togo, for example, is only allowed to export 1,500 wild ball pythons and 62,500 “farmed” ball pythons raised from collected eggs.Įven so, many snake hunters in Africa say it is harder to find ball pythons than it used to be. Under CITES treaty rules, countries are only allowed to export ball pythons if there is scientific evidence that collecting them will not endanger the native population. In just one year, 2019, 58 hunters collected 3,000 gravid (expecting) females and 5,000 eggs. Hunters in Togo collect females that are getting ready to lay eggs for sale to snake ranches. The CITES ( Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) Treaty made international trade in ball pythons legal in the 1990s.īetween 19 almost four million ball pythons were exported from Africa, 98 percent of them from Ghana and Togo. But we know millions of ball pythons once lived in Ghana and Togo. We don’t really know how many ball pythons live in each of these countries. The Geography of Ball Pythonsīall pythons live in sub-Saharan Africa from Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, Mali, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Benin, Ghana, and Nigeria, eastward through Chad, Cameron, and the Central African Republic to South Sudan and Uganda. Their preferred spots in those locations tell a lot about how to keep a ball python comfortable as a pet. But where can they still be found in the wild?īall pythons are native to western and central Africa south of the Sahara Desert, where they live in grasslands, shrubland, farmland, and open forest. Millions of ball pythons are kept by snake enthusiasts in North America and Europe. The National Pet Owners Survey reveals that 800,000 households in the USA keep pet snakes, but it is not known how many families have ball pythons.
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