Pythons need no introduction, least of all if you find yourself inadvertently sharing a toilet with one in the African bush – or even in a bathroom in England. On such embarrassing occasions the best policy is to quickly pull up your pants, mutter an apology and retreat – or, better still, run screaming to your mother. This option was understandably selected by a young boy in the English county of Essex when he discovered a small python peering up at him from the bowl of the family loo.
Other than its obvious function, a stylish ceramic bowl filled with cool water is just the thing for a python to wrap around on a hot summer’s day or night, and having a flexible backbone with 133 vertebrae certainly helps in getting comfortable. If you’re below a certain size, it’s even possible to plunge in and explore the linkages in the neighbourhood plumbing, as the slippery little individual in the toilet in Essex was presumably doing. Scuba diving equipment is unnecessary because they can hold their breath under water for a very long time – up to an hour if necessary.
Pythons like to keep their body temperature just below 32 degrees centigrade, so when they start to feel too hot they seek shade, go underground, slide into a rock crevice or into the nearest river or dam. Heading for a WC is not usually an option, but in an increasingly crowded and careless world, where exotic pets are not uncommon, it can happen more often than people think.
An African python that managed to escape into the suburbs of Essex would struggle to survive the vagaries of an English summer, let alone a bitter winter. If it somehow did, and fortuitously bumped into a fellow escapee of the opposite sex, breeding successfully would prove virtually impossible. Python eggs need to be kept warm, above 28 degrees centigrade, to give them any chance of hatching. Even in Africa, brooding southern African pythons often need to bask in the sun, allowing their body temperature to rise to dangerous levels so that they can then curl around their eggs and transfer the warmth. That’s impossible on a soggy weekend in Southend-on-Sea.
There are, however, more benign places where escaped or released pythons have prospered, including one of the world’s leading depositories of unwanted exotic fauna: the Florida Everglades. African pythons are hugely outnumbered there by Burmese pythons, but it’s still early days. The Burmese have settled in wonderfully, and gotten to know the indigenous neighbours so well that they frequently have them for lunch. Life in the Everglades, for the moment at least, is actually an improvement on their natural home in Southeast Asia, where things haven’t been going at all well for pythons lately. One of the reasons is that well over 100,000 have been yanked out of their natural habitat by dealers in recent years, and shipped off to the USA as pets.
Not that they’re bragging about it, but African rock pythons can grow a little bigger than their Burmese cousins, capable of surpassing a length of 5 metres, if they live long enough. The biggest weigh in the vicinity of 60 kilograms, at least between meals. These behemoths can gulp down an animal as big as an impala or a wild dog. After such a huge meal the snake is, of course, suddenly a great deal heavier, and it can take a couple of weeks to get back to sensible proportions. In the immediate aftermath, the rotund snake is itself vulnerable, not just to fat jokes, but also to predators with a taste for stuffed snake, with a surprise side dish of marinated impala. While the meal is being digested, the snake understandably tries to stay well hidden in a burrow or dense undergrowth.
Being uniquely equipped to pig out doesn’t necessarily mean that every meal has to consist of a jaw-stretching mountain of meat. Everyone does their best when the man from the Guinness Book of Records is watching, but even the biggest pythons sometimes choose fairly modest portions – a dassie, a duck, or even, for the particularly daring, a prickly porcupine. On the whole, pythons have a preference for warm-blooded prey but they’re certainly not averse to making selections from the cold buffet: monitor lizards, young crocodiles, and fish when available.
Pythons are cold blooded themselves, a state commonly equated to being heartless, and yet they’re famous for their tight embraces. Not everyone who comes along can expect a big hug of course, and by and large the snakes remain aloof, invariably slipping away unobtrusively if disturbed while out in the open. Even their nuptials are civilised by animal standards. Any number of eager males will follow the scent trail laid down by a receptive female, but fights never happen.
Relatively recent research has revealed that, despite seeming implacable, cold and uncaring, some female African pythons actually look after their young, at least after a fashion. When the eggs hatch they don’t simply breathe a serpentine sigh of relief and immediately slip away, as previously thought. Instead, the mother stays in attendance for three or four weeks, perhaps a lot longer, providing body warmth for the brood at night and deterring predators simply by being there. What is more surprising is that the young, like all newborn snakes well able to fend for themselves, choose to stay with her. It can’t be for the free meals because there aren’t any.