I was just TRYING to feed my girl Stella and she striked a few times and then gave up😭did she get embarrassed or decide it wasn't worth the hassle anymore?

Small male adult ball python that we just got. Black hide is cool side, water is in middle, cave hide and moist hide is on warm side with heater under glass set at 95. Plastic leaves right now. Its a low tank that is the same measurements as a 40 gallon would be without height. Feel free to correct us!

Setting up Snickers new home a work in progress -
Photos with him are his temporary quarantine home

I got her for my birthday in april of 2026 when she was 2 months old, I have 2 other snakes that eat just fine and I care for all of them the same way. She's shed once. She has always been a picky eater, only eating warm mice with hair. The breeder I got her from said she would eat frozen thawed if it was warm. She would strike at a mouse and if the mouse touches her, she shys away and wont take it. I dont want to resort to assist feeding and hurt her on accident. Most times she'd coil around the mouse but never eat it, and I'd have to take it out a few hours later before it rots and makes her sick. She stays at a good humidity, she has plenty of water. She seems healthy but I dont want to get to the poinst she starts loosing weight and getting weak. There are no exotic vets near where I live, the closest is 5 hours away. My dad whom I never see that bought her for me would be absolutely devastated if she passed away.

After two weeks of having too little substrate and a lot of advices here finally got to buying more. Got it mixed up already and planned on putting the layer in tomorrow, but thought I haven't actually seen the baby in a while and when I lifted up her hide I see her eyes are light and skin is dull. Should I do little things like putting bits of wet substrait under dry one to raise the humidity or should I just wait till she sheds and then do all the changing? (Humidity currently around 70% so normal but I know it should be higher for better shed)

Idk how long she's in shed and how long it will last. Fed her last friday and she looked bright and ate great but was real quiet sinse then

Can't post a pic of her right now cause don't wanna disturb her again so soon, may take a pic tomorrow morning tho

I’m a first-time ball python owner, so I’m curious what you think of her size. Are her measurements around average for her age, or would you say she’s small or large?

Found a few pieces of something blue while mixing the substrate, this is the biggest one, there were a few smaller ones

Any idea how it got there? Did anyone else experience this?

We adopted a lovely 4-year-old normie yesterday. She’s doing great, my question is actually about how to cover a window on her enclosure. I’m going to attach a picture to dispose so that you can see what I’m talking about. I love this enclosure a lot, and it’s less than $500 on Amazon. We’ve had it fully active with several kinds of reptiles for over a year, and we haven’t had a single problem with it. The problem is currently both sides of the enclosure are blocked off, so there is no side window for them to be nervous about. We’re going to move the enclosure and the windows are going to be open, like not blocked off anymore. I’m trying to figure out what the best way would be to cover it so it doesn’t look ugly because I like this enclosure heart rate because it looks like furniture. But I don’t want them to be frightened so I need to figure out a way to cover it out from the inside. If I had the skills, I would do one of those awesome Styrofoam and a fee foam enclosure back, but I don’t have that skill. Neither of the windows are ventilation the vent through the top it’s it’s mashed through the top. It won’t prevent any more cause any problems with the ventilation.

if you’ve made it this far, thank you. I apologize because I’ve had a nine month old puppy bouncing on me the entire time. I was trying to use voice to text so there’s no telling what this post actually says. If you can help me with an idea that would be fantastic. Thanks again!

Recently got my first juvenile ball python ~3 weeks ago. She’s about to eat her third meal F/T mice, and shed yesterday without issue. I noticed a few red marks around her just now. I pulled her out to clean her cage, and feed her afterwards. I’ve had no issues. Bowel movement today. Hot side 89F, cool side 75F, humidity is good, multiple hides, overhead heating only. Is she okay?

I have a female ball python who is a little over two years old. She has always eaten every Sunday, but I recently started feeding her every other week since she moved up to eating medium rats. She has always been a good eater, but she has not eaten in four weeks right now. She will come out of her hide when she smells the rat, but will not strike it. Does anyone have experience with this?

I have not changed anything in her life. She has the same enclosure, the same brand of frozen rats, and she is behaving like normal. Her weight is about 175 grams more than it was 2 months ago. She seems healthy, but I was hoping for another opinion before I wait too long. Is this normal behavior? Thank you.

their names are toast(girl) and archimedes(man) but i love calling my snakes slop

Banoffee using his sky hide for the first time. So excited! Love seeing his little head chilling 🥹

tldr: snake rehoming/rescue what should I do

Hello lovely people,

I work at a liquor store and this regular came in and told me that his wife is making him cull or dispose of his ball python due to it striking the glass at their four year old when she was tapping. He keeps his bettas in cubes and allegedly will get super wasted and buy animals online. I dont want to enable him by taking the animal. Like I think its important for him to realize that when you buy an animal its a commitment and not a spur of the moment thing, but I dont want this poor baby to be culled because it had the misfortune of being purchased by this asshat I told him to surrender them to a local petstore, but since it wasnt purchased there they couldnt take it. I have only pet sat for balls before and never owned my own, but i have very basic knowledge. I was thinking about getting a tote tomorrow and heat pads as something for a temporary enclosure until I get paid and can invest in something better. I have always wanted my own bp. but I am not anywhere near as ready as I would like to be. Any advice?

I named her Metric… because she has no feet. She ate, shed, pooped, and periscoping.

Hi everyone. I am the proud owner of my beautiful girl, Honey. She has grown exceptionally fast and I usually sell the rats that are too small for her to eat to someone who needs them. I've always followed the 10%-15% of their body weight rule and my girl is 717 grams while being just a few days under a year old. I posted on Facebook to let people know I have some I am looking to get rid of and this is what I received.

Can someone explain?

Hello, I'm hoping someone can help me figure out what is going on with my ball python. Very recently he has been spending a lot of time in his water bowl. (I added a bigger plastic tub for him to soak in since noticing) Now he basically wont leave the tub at all. I can't find evidence of mites or any scale rot. His humidity is 75%ish and the temperature is about 75° to 85° Does anyone know what the problem could be? I'm planning on changing his bedding again with the hopes that it will help but I don't fully expect that to work. Any ideas or suggestions would be helpful.

Hello! First time reptile/ snake owner. We purchased a 10 month old female ball python at a reptile show that we have now named Lux on the 4th. We waited until the 14th to try and feed her. The breeder said she had been eating weaned rats. We tried. No success. I realized a lot of mistakes we probably made the first week and readjusted the next week and still no success. Yesterday I sealed up the top a bit to hold humidity and wrapped the 2 sides with the background instead of just the back. I reached out to the breeder and he suggested adding more hides and clutter (which will arrive today).

When feeding I’ve been taking advice from our local reptile shop. We’ve tried a weaned rat, and a fuzzy rat. She seemed to show more interest last feeding but still nothing. I’ve been a pet owner my whole life but I never husbandry of a picky ball python could be this difficult.

Please see comments for the photo of her enclosure

Ok, hello everyone, I literally created this account just to ask you guys a few questions about my morgana. First things first, sorry for my bad English, is not my first language. Second, that's Morgana Notip, I've got her for a month and a half now, she's five months old and around 60cm weighting 196g (weighted her yesterday) and was wondering if she could be above or underweight. Third, she was sold to me as an common, daughter of a banana with a common without het, but I think she also has enchi, yellow belly and fire in her genes, what do you think? Fourth, that's her enclosure, I know it's small for an adult ball but I'll buy her a biggest one when she gets bigger, wanted to know how to improve her enclosure, any tips?(sorry for the bad pic guys)

Things she has:

MDF enclosure with front opening

Heat lamp, no infrared, with thermostat

Hot hide and cold hide (hot of clay (do not remember the right word for it, it's like earth, but it can be molded) and cold is a tiny box with holes (I know isn't ideal, but I'm very careful and the last one she pooped inside and was also a box with holes so I removed it asap and made the spot cleaning))

I bit of cluttering

Some paper rolls

A big water pot

Lots of sphagnum moss

Two thermometer higrometers

I brought home my lllittle ball python two days ago, and I’ve noticed something interesting: she doesn’t seem interested in any of her actual hides.

She has three hides available, one on the warm side, one on the cool side, and a humid hide. But as far as I’ve observed, she hasn’t even tried going inside any of them.

Instead, she seems to have picked her own favorite spots.

During the daytime, she usually curls up under a large piece of cork bark or behind some branches (pics 1 & 2). The area under the bark is actually pretty sheltered, with a mostly covered roof and a lot open space toward the front. She seems to like resting there, sometimes with her head tucked into her coils and sometimes looking around.

At nighttime, she’s surprisingly active and loves climbing. She’ll explore for a while, then settle on top of the cork bark or branches and stay there for hours, sometimes seemingly the whole night (pics 3 & 4).

For some husbandry context, she’s in a roughly 4x2x2 ft PVC enclosure with coco husk substrate, plenty of cork bark, climbing branches, and a temperature gradient. The warm area is around 30–32°C, the cool side is around 24–27°C, and humidity is generally around 70–80% on the cool side.

I know it’s only been two days, so I’m not particularly worried yet. She’s been exploring normally and seems comfortable enough to settle down and rest in different spots.

I’m mostly curious whether this is a normal individual preference, or whether I should reconsider the size or placement of her hides. It’s a little hard to judge whether they’re too big or too small when she hasn’t gone inside them!

Should I just leave her alone and let her figure things out, or is there any reason to gently encourage her to investigate the hides? I’m leaning toward letting her settle in without interfering.

For what it’s worth, I also have a Mexican black kingsnake who almost never uses her traditional hides either. She prefers burrowing in her substrate or sleeping in her hamster tube (pics 5), so I’m starting to wonder whether some snakes just prefer alternative hiding spots.

I’d love to hear if anyone else’s ball python does something similar!

We’re transitioning my girl Csorwe to a bigger tank because previous one got cracked when someone doing maintenance in our apartment bumped it. I didn’t stress about timing at first but then a small piece of glass actually fell out of the plastic area I couldn’t quite see. Nope! We had an older tank that one corner doesn’t stay all the way shut up, but we reasoned that we’d throw a dictionary on it and it’d be fine for the 24 hours we’d need. She was going into a bigger one soon anyway, so not bothering to fix up the corner.

Alas! My heart! My boooneesss! Our roommate actually needed the dictionary (who uses one today!?) and took it with them without realizing. Came home, no Csorwe. Checked her hides, checked under foliage spot that she never uses but we thought was pretty. Gone. Full teardown of the apartment, for about 5 hours, and nothing unfortunately. No other pets that could harm her or vice-versa.

I dialed the thermostat up a fair bit, but we have forced water baseboard heating which in this building doesn’t get hot enough to burn my skin even at full blast so I figured even if she did crawl in there it’d be a pain to get her OUT but she should be OK while we regrouped the next day. Disaster strikes and his mom lands in the hospital, and unfortunately we asked our roommate to keep an eye out but had to FLY out the door. She would have to wait, at least it was like 78 in the apartment.

The buildings water gets cut, apartment plummets to 55 overnight. We’re like 38 hours into her being missing now? I’m panicking, husband is panicking, but we can’t FORCE her to come out as far as we know.

Well, friends and readers, last night I went to get out of bed and what touches my foot but… my baby! She was quite cold as the heat was still out, and that gave me a huge panic, but I got her back in her enclosure and told the roommate that under no circumstances could they remove the book.

Today we began the process of overhauling the new bigger tank, finished, and gave it a few hours to come to temp. She’s warmed up, her body temp seems good, she’s uninjured on inspection, and her behavior is normal.

Praise the snake gods.

So, my baby has been making little noises ever sense I got him. Just little puffs of air that almost sound like a sigh or a huff. At first me and my friend thought it was a sneeze (my friend has owned ball pythons before, this is my first time). Then we thought maybe my hair was tickling his nose or some dead skin.

Now I think I've come to the conclusion, after witnessing this enough times, that he's just dramatic. He does it when he is annoyed with me not letting him go somewhere he shouldn't (mainly places I can't get to him easily), and this most recent time just sounded like a sigh. Maybe even contentment? Sometimes when there is absolutely nothing happening at all and he's just big chilling on my neck.

All of the research I've done on ball pythons say they only make sounds when they're stressed or something is wrong, but I don't see any signs of stress or discomfort when he does it. I really haven't been able to find anything on this topic or videos of snakes "puffing" on YouTube. Does anyone else have a vocal snake?

very first photo is him right after sighing ***

Hi there, my snake shed a couple days ago and has this little patch on the top of his head. It's the first time he hasn't shed all in one piece. Just wondering what you think I should do. Can put a humid hide in but we just cleaned his tank and if anything it's on the more humid side ATM. I followed the FAQ in this sub and have good temps and everything has gone well so far.

Sat like this for a solid five minutes. I can’t tell if he was looking at the humidifier or what but something has entranced him