It is something they really need to do, but these rock pythons aren't soaking up the sun like they should. Scientists find that tourists in Rajasthan are venturing close to these cold-blooded reptiles and altering their sun-basking behaviour by forcing them to retreat to their burrows often. This could affect their physiology and lower breeding rates in a region home to the highest number of rock pythons in India.
Snakes and other cold-blooded animals have to regulate their body temperatures behaviourally, by living in burrows or basking in the Sun. To study how Indian rock pythons adapt to extreme weather conditions in Keoladeo National Park (where temperatures range between 0.5 and 50 degrees Celsius), scientists at the Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History (SACON) and Manipal University (MU) monitored up to 47 burrows for three years (2013-2016). Each burrow housed up to three pythons; in their paper published in Global Ecology and Conservation, the team estimate the python population in the 29-sq-km Park to be around 80.
Camera traps
To monitor the snakes’ basking patterns, the scientists installed camera traps at six burrows from October 2015 to May 2016. The pythons were most active during February; they usually emerged out of their burrows between 9 and 10 a.m. and retreated between 5 and 6 p.m, basking continuously for 4-5 hours a day with their mean basking time peaking at noon.
To check if the Park’s high tourist inflow affects the pythons’ basking patterns, the team also installed one camera trap each near a disturbed, semi-disturbed and undisturbed burrow (classified based on tourist footfall). With the cameras deployed across 182 days, the team finds that pythons in undisturbed burrows basked for an average of 60 minutes per day. In disturbed burrows, however, pythons retreated just after noon and spent only around 36 minutes basking.
Tourists repeatedly approached specific burrows to less than 10 metres, forcing pythons to retreat and emerge more frequently. “This could prevent them from maintaining an optimum body temperature, leading to production of infertile eggs and thus lowering breeding rates,” says author H. N. Kumara, senior scientist (SACON).
In response, the Rajasthan Forest Department is taking lead author Aditi Mukherjee's help to revise the Park’s management plan. “We are now permitting tourist access to only two spots and from a safe distance,” says Chief Wildlife Warden G. V. Reddy.
