Royal pythons turned out to be surprisingly "sociable."

The representatives of the species Python regius are among the smallest African pythons. Adult individuals typically grow to a length of up to one and a half meters. Royal pythons are often kept as pets. According to one previous study, they rank second in popularity after bearded dragons.

Generally, royal pythons are kept in captivity alone, as people do not consider these snakes to be social. However, findings from a recent study published in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology suggest otherwise.

Royal pythons lead a very reclusive lifestyle, so little is known about their social behavior in the wild. Researchers from Wilfrid Laurier University (Canada) aimed to observe how young royal pythons would interact if placed in proximity to their peers. The experiments led to an unexpected discovery.

For the experiment, six pythons of different sexes were placed in a spacious enclosure for 10 days, equipped with sufficient individual hiding spots for each snake. The activities inside were recorded on camera.

To the researchers' surprise, all six reptiles quickly gathered in one box and spent more than 60 percent of their time together. Assuming the snakes might prefer that particular hiding spot, the experimenters removed it. However, after an initial period of confusion, the pythons soon chose another location where they again coiled together.

The researchers repeated the experiment over several years with five different groups of young pythons, but the trend of “staying together” persisted. The authors of the study tested various scenarios. They visited the enclosure twice a day, mixed the snakes, and placed them in the middle of the enclosure and in different hiding spots. Yet each time, the reptiles preferred to gather together rather than curl up alone in a box.

Observations also revealed that the pythons frequently emerged to explore the enclosure together, with males doing so more often than females. However, the snakes consistently returned to their “base” — one of their preferred boxes.

“It blew my mind. I didn’t expect this from a snake that I didn’t consider social,” stated lead author of the study and quantitative ecology specialist Morgan Skinner (Morgan Skinner) in an interview with The New York Times.

According to him, royal pythons turned out to be more social than garter snakes, which were previously studied. In a series of earlier experiments, researchers found that these members of the colubrid family could be surprisingly “friendly,” with individual snakes showing clear preferences for who they wanted to be near.

No such tendencies were observed in pythons. Morgan noted that they simply desired to be together in one hiding spot.

Commenting on the research, Vladimir Dinets (Vladimir Dinets), a reptile social behavior specialist from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville (USA), pointed out that no animal behaves in captivity the same way it does in the wild. Nevertheless, he described the experiment as valuable and acknowledged that he found no flaws in its execution.

The authors of the study did not rule out the possibility that the pythons' “sociability” might be a result of captivity. However, they also entertain another option: perhaps in the wild, royal pythons leave communal burrows when hungry and return “home” after hunting.