Royal Python

The Royal Python is also widely known as the Ball Python which is a very popular breed of snake bought within the exotic pet industry. It has a wide variety of different morphs within its species, these are types of colours and distinctive features that have been bred for the desired appearances for many enthusiastic pet owners. However, although its different varieties of morphs are interesting, its naturally selected adaptations are even more so.

Adaptations and benefits to its survival

Many snake species have special sensory adaptations called pit organs, which is particularly found in the ball python species. This organ is used to detect infrared rays, which are found in warm blooded animals such as mice. This is very important when hunting, as they can use their pit organ to sense a warm blooded prey species near to them, once they have detected it they can then follow this sense and kill their prey. Without this snakes would find it very hard to catch their prey, as due to evolving this sensory adaptation, their eyesight has decreased its function as it became less and less important when catching warm blooded animals.

Snakes are ectothermic, which means they rely on heat sources to keep them warm due to being cold blooded animals. The pit organ also aids to distinguish objects around the snake that are warm or cool which is essential for keeping warm and for hunting. The pits are situated on either side of the snakes head which contain infrared sensitive tissue cells important for this heat tracking kind of sensory organ. (Sfpinteractive.com, 2016)

This sensory adaptation has been evolved only in certain species of snake, such as the ball python, pit viper and boa. Although other snake species do have this heat vision only those species listed have evolved in a certain way to specifically have infrared vision along with heat. In a simpliar format the specificed species can see prey and heat in a more complex way for maximum survival.

Snakes may have evolved to have this specific adaptation according to the environment they were living in, this may have been because the snakes available food may have decreased in population and so just heat vision may not have been enough for the snakes to gain enough prey to survive. The specialised species that evolved to then have infrared as well as heat vision, could have adapted to a new technique which benefited the snake in which the snakes that did have these extra sensory organs survived for longer, to then pass on its genes.

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