heres what happened :
shes saved them up for 15 years (the last time she was near a male) at least …apparently, 3 are going to make it tho
They’ve had that snake at the zoo for 59 years and have never given her a name?!
the link also says they took the ones that didn’t make it to be tested to see if she just had some stored fertile eggs or had managed it totally by herself and placed the live ones in an incubator… isn’t that traumatic to mom ?
Reptiles may have some basic emotions, such as fear and aggression, but they are not as complex as those in mammals. For one thing, they lack the limbic system that evolved in mammals and is largely responsible for emotions.
Removing the eggs might possibly cause some distress and anxiety, but not to the extent as the loss of young would in mammals. Placing the eggs in an incubator maximizes the chance that some will hatch.
What does this part I put in bold mean?
Three of the eggs remain in an incubator, two were used for genetic sampling and snakes in the other two eggs did not survive, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
I’m hoping it meant the eggs were non-viable, not that they sacrificed two of the potential snakelets arbitrarily, though I lean towards that being what they actually did or they wouldn’t have mentioned them separately from the two that did not survive…
Yes, I’m assuming they sacrificed two eggs, then two of the other five left have failed (so far). It’s not in this article but she did the same thing in 2009 and none of the eggs survived. It’s quite possible none will survive this time because she is a very, very old mom and even normal clutches generally have a non-viable egg or two. Sacrificing a couple of eggs that may have turned out to be non-viable anyway is no big deal. They aren’t particularly rare.
They may not need or want 5 more ball pythons. Ball pythons are commonly bred in captivity. Although zoos may trade excess stock to other zoos, it may be that any zoo that wants the species already has some.
A minor nitpick, but the concept of the limbic system (the paleomammalian cortex where affective responses are assumed to be concentrated) has become a disputed and among some quarters largely deprecated concept in affective neuroscience. The concept was frequently used to justify the notion that animals other than mammals were not capable of experiencing emotions or having any kind of interior life despite the fact that man species of Aves, which have no identifiable lymbic structures other than the more recently identified subpallial amygdala, have complex social interactions, extended child rearing behaviors, and many species of Covidae and Psittaciformes clearly have not only the ability to think through problems but have emotional responses linked to long term memories. (Just ask anyone who has ever killed a crow or raven, or any parrot owner.)
While affective responses are certainly linked to circuits within the basolaterla complex in mammals, given how similar they are across the wide array of mammalian species it seems quite likely that these evolved from more primitive structures that provided emotional arousal in earlier pre-mammalian vertebrate species and have just evolved differently in other classes of animals with complex cerebellum even if they don’t have a well developed cerebrum. Whether a mother snake feels any anxiety or grief over the loss of eggs is virtually unknowable (cannot be observed externally because the behavior and physiological response of reptiles is very different from any mammals, and not internally because we don’t have a means of identifying brain states of a snake in situ), it is noteworthy that many species of python, unlike most snakes (even viviparous species), do actually demonstrate some very basic protective behaviors such as protecting eggs from predators even at risk to their own safety, so there is some kind of instinctive (read:affective) drive to protect their eggs.
However, while I don’t think it is possible to in any way quantify the affective states or capabilities of reptiles (it is difficult enough to do for non-primate mammals), it seems highly unlikely that removal of eggs would cause a mother python more than transitory anxiety and nothing akin to long-term grief, given how frequently they lose eggs in the wild. For non-social animals, grief and other memory-linked responses would not have a clear evolutionary purpose and would obviously be detrimental for survival.
See the work of the late Jaak Panksepp, and particularly Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions and The Archaeology of the Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions for more information on the relatively current research on evolution of affective responses.
Stranger
I dont think they actually hatched because there wasn’t any follow up as far as I know of