Animal · Ghana, Togo, Benin
Ball python
Python regius — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The ball python is a short, thick snake from the grasslands of West Africa that curls into a tight ball with its head tucked inside when it is frightened. It has no venom and hunts rats at night.
Picture credit: Squamata55 (CC BY 2.0) · Tris T7 (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the ball python live?
Home: Grassland, savanna and farm edges of West Africa.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Cameroon, the Ivory Coast, the Senegal, Uganda.
Conservation status from the IUCN: close to being at risk.
The short profile
Fully grown: usually 100–140 cm long, up to 182 cm. It weighs about 1.5 kilograms. On the menu: meat.
The story behind it
The ball python owes its English name to that defence: rolled up, it is a smooth ball that a jackal cannot easily bite or unfold. It hunts after dark and finds warm-blooded prey with rows of heat-sensing pits along its lips, which read the temperature of a rat in the dark like a rough picture. Most of the day it stays underground in an abandoned rodent burrow or a hollow termite mound. A female lays three to eleven large eggs and wraps herself around them for about two months, leaving them only rarely and eating nothing in that time. Millions have been taken from West Africa for the pet trade, and together with the loss of wild grassland this has pushed the species onto the near-threatened list.
Find it on the globe
Ball python is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Why is it called a ball python?
Because a frightened one curls up into a ball with its head hidden in the middle, so a predator finds nothing soft to bite. In Europe it is also called the royal python.
Is a ball python dangerous?
Not to people. It has no venom, it is only about a metre and a half long, and its first answer to danger is to hide its head rather than to fight.
How long does a ball python live?
Well cared for, twenty to thirty years is normal. The oldest one on record reached sixty-two, most of that time at a zoo in Saint Louis.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
Last checked: