Dear Chris,



Thanks for a thoughtful and helpful reply.



First, let me say that I hadn't heard of any burmese pythons that got burned, but it sounds as if you've heard mostly of burmese pythons getting burned. Frankly, most of what I've heard was about ball pythons getting burned. I can see that we've both got a python species pegged as the "most likely to get burned".



Second, you may be onto something with the idea that this is an issue concerning temperate versus tropical. I don't have a rosy boa, and I just got a baby rubber boa, so I'm not in much position to test anything with them. I'm sure I'll have my mind in gear as I work with them, and if anything presents itself, I'll pass it along.



It does make sense that a temperate snake would possess greater ability to sense heat, since they must deal with summer heat and winter chills. The tropical species just live in an endless succession of warm days, and really don't need to sense the heat. Perhaps it's like the blind cave fish, who no longer have the eyes they really can't use. If the tropical snakes don't need to sense heat, perhaps they've LOST the ability.



Of course, I was working from the idea that the oldest snakes probably are mostly unchanged from how they first evolved. That is, today's ball python is pretty much identical to the first ball pythons that evolved many millions of years ago. I admit I have no basis at all for that idea, I just sorta thought that's how it might work. So I suppose that the tropical snakes might have originally possessed better temperature sensing organs, and then lost them over time.



And it is true that my experience is limited just to corn snakes, so far. I had someone tell me he had seen corn snakes burned, but upon further questioning, it turned out those were all snakes rescued (in a rescue program in Seattle), and no one knew how they had gotten burned. However, none of them were burned on the belly. Rather, they were burned on the sides or the very edge of the belly. So the burn pattern doesn't sound as if they lay on a hot surface, which is really the thrust of my investigation at the moment.



Thanks for the compliment about my analogy. I'm just glad I didn't inadvertently start a flame war with that analogy.



What is very clear is that the "one size fits all" mentality does not work when it comes to heating concerns. Of course, we all know that different snakes have different heating needs (95 degrees basking for one snake, 80 degrees with no basking spot for another). But perhaps there is another, equally individualized aspect of the snakes, that is, their ability to sense and move away from dangerously overheated surfaces. Pythons will crawl onto one, fall asleep, and darn near cook themselves to death. Corn snakes avoid the heat as if it is a solid object they cannot slither through.



I haven't tried the final experiment, I suppose, in which the only place that is dangerously hot is the small area inside the only hide box in the cage. Would a corn snake choose to hide in the hide box, following its overwhelming instinct for security, or would the snake even then avoid the hide box, according to some inner mechanism that senses the danger of the hot surface? But it seems almost cruel to stage that sort of experiment, when all I really want to know is whether the snake might get burned if the heat tape, under an inch of substrate, is hot enough to burn a python. Even if the hide box were directly above the heat tape, (which it never is), the surface temperature of the top of the layer of substrate is usually only about 90 degrees.



Thanks again for raising a very interesting idea about temperate snakes having differing evolutionary pressures than tropical snakes.



Michael Kraft

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• colubrids versus primitive snakes (pythons) - mkraft, Sat Dec 6 14:21:24 2003
• Temperate vs. Tropical??? - chris_harper2, Sat Dec 6 15:02:37 2003
• couple of other comments... - chris_harper2, Sat Dec 6 15:36:58 2003
• RE: Temperate vs. Tropical??? - mkraft, Sun Dec 7 23:37:31 2003