Can you keep ball pythons together

Alessia will no doubt come on eventually and provide the example that will deter any owner and i mean owner, not store or shop from housing more than one bp for anything other than breeding.

The smaller or weaker of the two will be eaten. No doubt about it, it will happen. They are solitary animals and the only time they should be housed together is between one male and one female, and only for breeding. Other than this they will compete for space and eventually one will be swallowed to "resolve the issue" of whose territory is whose.

Not angry at you i promise. Just dont want your snakes, and you, to suffer that sort of event. Ball pythons] [2. Halfmoon betta] [0. I agree with not housing them together also, but The chances of your Ball eating his cage mate is slim.

If the snakes are fed properly they will not generally try to eat each other. I know cannibalism has happen between Balls, but it is not common. As was pointed out snakes are generally solitary creatures and become stressed when housed together. Also transferring diseases between the two snakes is possible. At feeding time you would have to separate the two, to prevent fighting over the same food item. It just is not a good idea to keep them together, although some people do it with no issues.

Not the best idea to co habit a lot of species.. I won't go over the same points as above, but here's a couple I've seen myself from a friend co-habiting corn snakes. He would tell me that they loved to curl up together and lie together.. Well there was only2 hides, one hot and one cold. So there wasn't really a choice if they needed heat. This to me looks like a dominance display as the bigger corn's head was usually on top. He also refused to separate at feeding time.

This led the bigger corn eating hers faster than usual and getting the smaller corn's head in her mouth after attempting to eat his mouse aswell. This is when I convinced him to give them up as he'd lost interest and didn't really care. It can be done successfully but you've got to be careful and provide the right enclosure including lots of different hides with multiple warm spots.

You could, of course, feed them in separate tanks, but that comes with its own set of problems as well. Ball pythons have also been known to starve themselves and die because they were forced to share a tank. This is certainly not what you want for your reptile pets. Having another animal in their cage can cause a ball python to constantly deal with low-level stress.

If you have two or more ball pythons in a cage, any type of disease one snake gets can quickly spread to the other snake in the tank. Of course, you already know that the best way to ensure your snake is healthy is by checking his stool periodically. This usually happens if one of the ball pythons is larger than the other. It especially happens if a ball python is left in a cage with hatchlings.

While experts agree that ball pythons should be kept in separate cages to live, there are pet owners who have put them in the same cage and had good results. Snakes, however, are best housed singly and generally should not be combined in one tank, even if they are of the same species. If you are thinking about having more than one reptile in a tank, you can help ensure success with these six precautions. Ball pythons are normally docile creatures that very rarely attack. Whether or not a ball python is aggressive has nothing to do with the morph type its breed or its gender.

Males are typically non-aggressive, and females are the same, except in the case where they are protecting their eggs. A baby ball python can be housed in a gallon tank, but an adult will need an enclosure that is a minimum of 3 or 4-feet long, such as a gallon tank.

Does a ball python bite hurt? You will probably feel the effects of a python bite because it can cause scratches, puncture wounds, bruising, and even possibly deeper internal damage. These bites may be painful during the bite and as your injuries heal. If you do take your snake outside, keep hold of it at ALL times. The downside is that snakes will scare people.

Handle your snake at least x weekly, but no more than once daily. Snakes do not require social interaction for their mental health, but regular handling helps the snake stay tame and can be a good opportunity for exercise. Nonetheless, once you look at the Ball Python breeding strategy, and all the things they compete for, it starts to make a lot of sense. Many species of vertebrate have a specific breeding strategy that they use for mating or copulating and stick to most of the time.

The strategy used by Ball Pythons is promiscuity , also known as polygynandry. In this breeding strategy, males mate with multiple females polygyny and females mate with multiple males polyandry. While it sounds kind of like no strategy whatsoever, polygynandry is in fact a phenomenally successful way of breeding a healthy, competitive population. Males compete and fight for females , sometimes driving each other away with intense, moody wrestling matches. Even after copulating, the competition continues.

Hobbyist breeders often notice clutches that are sired by two males, rather than just one. This leads most people to agree that there is competition between the individual sperm to fertilize the eggs once released.

It may also mean that female cryptic choice is able to select sperm that is more genetically compatible. For males it means that even if they mate with a female, they have no guarantee of siring a clutch. They need to find as many females as possible to raise their chances!

What does all this competition mean for captive Ball Pythons? Well, it means that there is only one thing this gentle, laid-back snake really hates: another Ball Python on its turf! Lacking the aggression needed to kill it, it will simply try to ignore it, get away from it, or shove it around. Over time this would settle down, but the stress from being housed together would not disappear.

In Ball Pythons, stress can take more than one form. When under intense stress Ball Pythons become extremely restless, and seem to be constantly exploring, even during the day. This often occurs when placed in a new enclosure and can last a few days to a couple of weeks. Low-level stress is much harder to spot, however, and generally results in the animal stopping feeding. In my experience, this is what eventually happens when two Ball Pythons are housed together.

Before you ask, yes — I have tried keeping Ball Pythons together. I was a beginner once too and did a lot of things wrong when learning to keep reptiles! Bongo here is incredibly shy, and would undoubtedly suffer from severe stress if forced to live with another python.