We recently purchased a pair of Macklott's pythons, and were told that the male has a tough time shedding. When we got a look at him, it wasn't difficult to see why, he has some scarring down his back!
We weren't upset about it, because it really did look neat. After some time, I got to looking more closely at it and I would like to know if anyone has any opinions, thoughts, ideas, or comments about it.
Here are a few pictures of the scarring itself.
Picture 1
Picture 2
Picture 3
Picture 4
It's easy to say, right off, that it's probably scarring from a prey item or heating element, but I have to disagree. I've gotten a few other opinions and we are all under the same conclusion, I think.
The scarring must have been due to something that happened within the egg while developement. The reason for this conclusion is that the scarring isn't the typical scarring you find after an injury. In that type of situation you have less scales there as the little chunk of missing skin have been taken off. You then get the scarring by the two exposes sides of skin/scales fusing together. Same thing with humans....you lose a
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shaped piece of skin and the stitches are put in place to bring the two sides together.
In this guy, there seem to be MORE scales than in the non-scarred parts of him. So if it's scarring something that happened like prey or heating element, then someone seems to have gone in a grafted skin from another snake onto him to give him the odd scalation in those parts.
Another reason this conclusion was come to was that the scars are down two sides of his back for the most part (and a little here and there at other places) which would lead me to believe that's how he was arranged in the egg....maybe he had one side of the egg exposed to bring sunlight, or really wet substrate or something of the sorts.
Thanks for looking, and your comments would be highly appreciated!
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