On a fall day in Gainesville, Georgia, Justin Kobylka, the forty-two-year-old owner of Kinova Reptiles, was preparing to cut open two clutches of snake eggs. He was hoping to hit upon some valuable, beautiful reptiles. Kobylka is a breeder of designer ball pythons—one-of-a-kind, captive-bred snakes whose skin features colors and patterns not usually found in nature. “I think of myself as an explorer,” he told me. Nicking an egg with a pair of surgical scissors, he exposed a live hatchling in its goo. “Even when they haven’t yet touched air, you can sometimes see the tongue going,” he said, making a flicking gesture with his thumb and fingertip.
We were standing in a six-thousand-square-foot climate-controlled outbuilding that housed some two thousand pythons, which were kept in individual plastic trays slotted into tall metal racks. The space, which cost nearly a million dollars to build and outfit, was immaculate and well lit, with corner-mounted industrial fans and glossy floors. A vague odor of musk and Clorox was all that hinted at the daily chores of snake husbandry.
Ball pythons originated in Africa, and in the wild they are typically dark brown with tan patches and a pale underbelly. Those bred for their appearance, as Kobylka’s have been, often have a brighter palette, from soft washes of pastel to candy-colored bursts of near-fluorescence. Their patterns, too, have been transformed: a snake might be tricked out with pointillist dots, or a single dramatic stripe, or colors dissolving into one another, as in tie-dye. One captive-bred ball python’s splotches and squiggles show up only under a black light. These changes reflect genetic mutations, which breeders call morphs. (The term is also used as shorthand for the snakes themselves.) World of Ball Pythons, a repository of information related to breeding, has catalogued more than seven thousand morphs in the past thirty years—though the actual number likely exceeds that by several thousand. “Evolution can go very fast,” the animal-domestication expert and paleobiologist Marcelo Sánchez-Villagra, a professor at the University of Zurich, told me, adding that the variety of “ball pythons may be extreme even among reptiles.” Arguably, no other snake, lizard, or turtle has been so sweepingly restyled by human effort.
The animals Kobylka breeds at Kinova are sold to collectors, independent pet stores, and élite breeders who want to replicate, or even improve on, their design. The launch of a new morph is sometimes called a “reveal” or a “drop,” echoing the language of luxury-sneaker culture, and there are ball-python Internet forums that roil with opinion about which morphs are the hottest, and which ones aren’t worth the hype. The most coveted morphs have commanded higher prices than giraffes, lions, and tigers have at auction. “I’ve had offers of over a hundred thousand dollars on a snake,” Kobylka said. “But the way I operate, it’s important to keep those snakes for my future work. You actually lose money long-term if you sell the most amazing thing at the time.”
Kobylka, who is six feet two, was wearing a gray Lacoste polo, charcoal-colored jeans, and Adidas Sambas; he has dark hair, which he keeps short. In the first clutch, which had nine eggs, he was aiming, he said, for an “orange dream, yellow belly, enchi, leopard, desert ghost, carrying axanthic and clown genes.” What sounded like an incantation was a catalogue of desirable mutations. (“Clown,” for example, is named for teardrop shapes that show up under the eyes, like the stylized tears of a clown.) As a breeder, Kobylka always has a “goal snake” in mind. “You’ve done a lot of mental work to imagine it, usually years in advance,” he told me, describing a process of zeroing in on specific traits using the known heritability and interaction of genes. “Sometimes your odds are one in two hundred and fifty-six, or one in five hundred and twelve, to make the snake you’re thinking about,” he said. “The thing that makes it so addicting for me is the fact that there’s a large amount of chance involved.”
Kobylka has been breeding snakes for more than twenty years and is known as a trendsetter in the field, which is both close-knit and competitive. Courtney Capps, a co-founder of Leviathan Snakes, in South Carolina, observed that buyers are sometimes so proud of owning a Kinova python that, when it comes time to sell its offspring, they’ll note in the listing, “Mom was produced by Justin.” Kobylka gained an even wider audience in 2016, after he opened up an egg to find a white snake patterned with three orange smiley faces along its body. He had been trying to produce a “dreamsicle”—a white ball python with splotches of tangerine—but most of the circular markings on this snake had two eyes and a grin. Kobylka posted an image on his company’s Facebook page, and, when someone suggested in a comment that the photograph had been edited, he made a fifteen-second video that showed him turning the baby python from side to side to display its distinctive motif. The video of the “emoji python” went viral, and the story of the unusual snake was covered by Esquire, Business Insider, and the New York Post, among other outlets.
On the day I visited Kinova, Kobylka wasn’t filming the proceedings, but he sometimes shares egg-cutting videos on Patreon and YouTube. Ball pythons are able to hatch on their own, but such videos, in which a breeder gives a preview of a snakelet’s coloration, have garnered a dedicated following. Offering anticipation, disclosure, and irregular reward, they are, in many ways, similar to toy-unboxing sequences. The footage also has elements of the #oddlysatisfying content known as A.S.M.R. (autonomous sensory meridian response)—videos of human hands gently manipulating something slimy or soft, for instance, or holding an object ready to burst. It isn’t just egg cutting; the entire business of ball-python breeding is extremely online. Breeders deliver pro tips via live stream, develop colorways that will “pop” on Instagram, and often use language borrowed from digital-image editing, promising that a mutation will provide “amazing contrast” or “pixelated sides.” Ball-python aficionados can’t seem to get enough, finding in morphs a combination of clickbait, dream collectibles, data-driven hobby, and living art. Recently, a video of a ball python with the mottling of an overripe banana next to an actual banana was posted widely on X, while a TikTok video showing a ball python named Gizmo tracing a serpentine line on a tablet computer, as if on an Etch A Sketch, has been viewed approximately five million times. (“He tried to draw himself,” one commenter noted.)
It was balmy in the outbuilding. Kobylka modulates the temperature to stagger the pythons’ breeding cycles throughout the year (wild females become fertile in response to seasonal cues), but his snakes still seem to intuit the weather outside. A rainstorm can spark mating—Kobylka said that he will sometimes rush to match receptive females to males ahead of a downpour.
The first clutch, I learned, had a parent with a pastel gene, which, in addition to being commonplace, causes the animal’s coloring to fade over time. (The standard life span of a captive ball python is fifteen to thirty years, though the St. Louis Zoo had one that keepers believe lived to be at least sixty-two.) Pastel unfortunately dominated the brood: most of the snakes would be priced in the low thousands. But, Kobylka said, “every miss is, as probably a gambler would tell you, almost as exciting as a win.” A miss, he explained, will still find a home, and can provide useful information about how traits are masked, or about other polygenic effects.
Things went better with the next clutch. Glistening in the first shell was a tiny ball python with three recessive traits—“desert ghost, g-stripe, clown”—and another mutation called “spotnose.” The baby snake was the color of straw, with smoky markings down its body, as though it had been repeatedly pinched by hot tongs. “That’s everything it could be,” Summer Melville, Kinova’s business manager, said. The hatchling, a male, would retail for fifteen thousand dollars and be posted on MorphMarket, an e-commerce site for reptiles.
“My wife says I didn’t get as excited about our kids being born as when the eggs hatch,” Kobylka told me, “but I knew what to expect with our children.” (The Kobylkas have five children: two adopted, three biological.) “Actually,” he added, “our last son came out with red hair and blue eyes, so he was a double recessive.”
As Kobylka went around pulling out trays to show me some of his most valuable full-grown pythons, I was reminded that in nature these creatures are ambush predators. Charles Darwin believed that a fear of snakes is, to some degree, hardwired in us. In “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals” (1872), he recounts putting his face up against the glass enclosure of an adder in an attempt to conquer “the imagination of a danger which had never been experienced.” The adder struck at the barrier. Darwin couldn’t help but leap backward.
But ball pythons are not venomous, and were named for their tendency to curl up when threatened. The ones I saw tended to huddle in a corner, or contract slowly toward the farthest edge of their trays, which were lined with shredded coconut husk. They couldn’t hide their extraordinary appearance, though. I saw a sixty-thousand-dollar python of such stark elegance—bone white and ink—that you could imagine it being unveiled at the Venice Biennale, and a bubble-gum-pink python fit for Barbie. Kobylka admitted to getting quite attached to some of them. Star stickers had been placed on several racks to indicate his favorites, encouraging particular devotion from his staff. In the wild, ball pythons are nocturnal and live mostly underground, often in burrows taken over from rodent prey. They are not very social, though infants may stick together for a short time after hatching. Was Kobylka’s affection, then, one-sided? “Ball pythons don’t seem to mind being held, but they don’t seem as curious as some other species,” he said.
The team at Kinova would soon box up dozens of the company’s finest specimens and drive them to Tinley Park, Illinois, for the North American Reptile Breeders Conference (N.A.R.B.C.), one of the most anticipated reptile expos in the nation (“the Mecca of the ball-python market,” as one breeder called it). Kobylka, who owns several Porsches, including a 2016 Cayman GT4 Clubsport that he races, compared the N.A.R.B.C. to a premium car show, offering a window onto the future of the industry. A draw for attendees this year would be the opportunity to meet Emily Roberts, the star of Snake Discovery, a YouTube channel with more than three million subscribers. Kobylka himself was teasing the existence of a baby “sunset combo” on
YouTube. “We finally hit something really epic,” he announces in the video.
Before leaving Kinova, I asked if I could hold a ball python. Kobylka selected a small lemon-yellow snake and placed its rolled-up body on my open palm. I had expected something cool to the touch, but the snake was warm, the temperature of its enclosure. When I shut my eyes, the impression of it on my hand seemed remarkably faint. “They tend to just sit still, and they’re handleable,” Kobylka said. “They’re just so packaged.”
The ball python is known to zoologists as Python regius, or “royal python.” Cleopatra is rumored to have worn one as a bracelet, but the story is almost certainly apocryphal—ball pythons have never been native to Egypt. Today, ball pythons live in western Africa and parts of central and eastern Africa, from Senegal to the borderlands of South Sudan and Uganda. About three feet long, they can be found on the margins of rain forests and in the woods, but they have also adapted to managed environments: timber plantations, agricultural fields, trash heaps.
Snakes have evolved without major transformation for more than a hundred million years. Ball-python breeding and collecting is a relatively recent phenomenon. The high end of the American reptile market was long monopolized by large, heavy-bodied snakes, like boas and reticulated pythons. In the early twentieth century, dealers mainly sold their wares to film studios and zoos. By the mid-nineteen-sixties, improved habitat construction in zoos led to snowballing competition for hard-to-collect species—Angolan pythons plucked from war zones along the Namibia-Angola border, iridescent Boelen’s pythons caught on the mountainsides of Papua New Guinea. The consumer market for pet reptiles was sluggish by comparison; through the nineteen-eighties, wildlife traders viewed parrots as more profitable. The investigative journalist Bryan Christy has described reptiles as having been “the Bic lighters of the pet industry: cheap, disposable point-of-sale pets.”
In the early nineteen-nineties, though, household reptiles began to get a reputational makeover. Children raised on “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and “Jurassic Park” reimagined scaly pets as characterful and intriguing. Retailers started to see an uptick in iguana sales. New Caledonian crested geckos, believed extinct until 1994 and jeopardized today by wildfires and invasive predators, became well established in captivity. Snakes were pitched to prospective buyers as perfect for cramped urban residences: undemanding, hypoallergenic, and needing to be fed only once a week. Ball pythons—which were abundant in their natural habitats and, being compact and docile, highly transportable—were soon arriving in the U.S. by the crateful, tucked into sacks and pillowcases.
Between 1989 and 1999, exports of ball pythons from West Africa to the United States tripled. In “The Ultimate Ball Python,” an encyclopedic volume on morphs helmed by the breeder Kevin McCurley, one early broker described them as a “junk” species. In pet stores across the U.S., imported brown-and-tan ball pythons sold for around thirty dollars, discounted for being less alluring than other tropical reptiles. They were quintessential starter pets, and when he was in his mid-twenties McCurley, now an exuberant figure in the snake world, owned two: Eek and Meek. Speaking to me from what he called a “venomous room” in his breeding complex in New Hampshire, McCurley said that one day he had a vision of what ball pythons could be: “I looked at the vehicle of the ball python, and I said, ‘This is the ideal snake. But it needs a totally different paint job.’ ”
In 1989, an Oklahoma-based breeder named Bob Clark received a tip about a single albino ball python found in Africa. “I got a letter from a friend in The Hague, Netherlands, about a dealer in Ghana, who had the animal,” he told me. For a few years, Clark had been successfully cultivating albino Burmese pythons, costly novelties that can reach almost twenty feet, which he raised on rats, rabbits, and piglets. But in the ball python’s small size he saw an opportunity. On the strength of a photograph sent to him in the mail, he bought the albino for seven thousand dollars, a price that he said “seemed a little crazy” at the time.
It took Clark several years of linebreeding—mating snakes to their forebears, littermates, or descendants—to produce a second albino ball python, and more followed. (Such ball pythons aren’t pure white: you might get a snake with carrot-orange daubs or pale-yellow streaks.) He began selling the hatchlings at seventy-five hundred dollars apiece, and a wait list quickly formed. Collectors liked them, but his main type of client, he found, was the aspiring breeder. “Everybody wants nice, beautiful, expensive snakes that are rare,” he said. “One way they justify that to themselves, and their spouse, is to say, ‘This could be a moneymaker.’ ” Then, in 1994, Clark’s facilities were burgled. The thief got away with his founding albino male as well as females that were heterozygous for the trait. Clark retained a large enough colony to continue, but he began hearing rumors of other albino ball pythons: his supply was no longer exclusive. (The thief was eventually caught and ordered to pay a civil judgment of $2.5 million.)
Soon another ball-python type, the piebald, or pied, which features mottled brown spots on an ivory body and is considered scarce in the wild, became popular: in 1997, a pied ball python could sell for thirty thousand dollars. McCurley, who had been breeding reptiles while working a day job as an electronic technician, couldn’t afford an albino, let alone a pied. Instead, he started buying imports with minor irregularities, and mating them to determine whether a specific quirk could be passed on (a process known to breeders as “proving out”). Most anomalies were discreet—a bit of speckling, a squiggle along a spine. Matthew Lerer, who used to sort reptile shipments in South Florida, noted in “The Ultimate Ball Python” that McCurley would study the snakes’ markings for hours, “like he was a gemologist inspecting the Hope Diamond.” Mike Wilbanks, a snake breeder from Oklahoma, told me, of the years that followed, “Some of the morphs turned into gold mines. Some turned out to be just a dry, empty hole.” It is not possible to trademark a morph, but breeders came to view the particular designs they were working toward as commercially sensitive information. The first to produce a morph, and name it, gained celebrity.
Many breeders believe that ball pythons’ history of living primarily belowground has preserved an array of mutations related to appearance. The thinking is that eye-catching snakes living aboveground are more visible to predators, making them more liable to be picked off before their genes get passed on. (Ball pythons have poor color vision, and their markings, unlike those of many lizard species, are not thought to play a role in courtship.) By the early two-thousands, middlemen in Ghana, Togo, and Benin had learned that American buyers were willing to spend top dollar for “odd balls”—snakes that diverged from the wild type in even minor ways. What had been an amateur pursuit was fast becoming an industry. Ball-python exports from West Africa peaked at around two hundred and fifty thousand a year in 2005, and began to decline, as domestic breeding replaced mass importation. American captive-bred ball pythons seemed to better express buyers’ notion of the exotic. The wild type had begun to be seen, in McCurley’s words, as “garden variety.”
Perhaps not unrelatedly, snakes—and snakeskin—were having a moment in the broader culture as emblems of opulence and transgression. At the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards, Britney Spears sashayed across the stage with a seven-foot-long Burmese python slung around her shoulders. Gleaming in the windows of high-end fashion boutiques were python-skin footwear and clothes, often dyed traffic-light green, neon yellow, or electric blue, from Yves Saint Laurent, Jimmy Choo, and Chanel. (“Eve’s Revenge, the Python’s Sorrow,” one headline in the Times ran.) Ball pythons were too small to be profitable for the skin trade, but the Zeitgeist’s embrace of surreally hued scales conferred an aura of glamour on collecting and breeding them.
Kobylka had an itinerant childhood. His mother—who raised him and his younger brother on her own—sold handicrafts and moved the family to Nebraska, Oklahoma, Colorado, Tennessee, and Arizona. Wherever he was, Kobylka spent hours outside. “I always felt there’s a world within a spot,” he said. “Lizards and turtles and frogs, centipedes and salamanders—creatures most people would walk right past and never see.” His mother encouraged Kobylka’s pursuits but insisted that no animal be brought home. “That was the rule with my family: what’s wild is wild.”
When Kobylka was a teen-ager, he began attending a small religious boarding school in Oklahoma, where he became fascinated by scarlet king snakes, an elusive, tricolored species. After class, he would go searching for them, turning over logs and debris. He didn’t find one, but he did catch a rattlesnake, which he kept in a homemade cage in his dorm room until he himself was caught. “I met my wife at the school, and it was her mom who called and tattled on me,” Kobylka said with a laugh. The school did offer him an empty room to accommodate the rest of his collection, which by then included White’s tree frogs, box turtles, and a red-tailed boa he had bought at a pet store.
At nineteen, Kobylka spent a gap year in Benin, where ball pythons pocket the landscape. While there, he visited a Vodun temple and saw ball pythons, which are regarded as sacred, roaming freely. “I have pictures of me from that time, holding ball pythons, having no concept of: this is going to be my whole life,” he said. What captivated him then were chameleons—reptiles that change color for camouflage or to indicate excitation, rivalry, or submission. He gave local children pocket change for any that they could catch, and placed the animals on the boughs of a tree outside his lodgings. He would sometimes climb the tree and be surrounded by the creatures, the shade tick-ticking with eyes.
Kobylka attended Southern Adventist University, in Tennessee, where he majored in communications and began keeping king snakes—which are banded and slender—caged in his dorm bathroom; he soon had fourteen of them. He was reintroduced to ball pythons through the Web site of a Maryland-based breeder named Ralph Davis, who kept pieds. “He had this rock-star personality,” Kobylka told me. “Ralph’s site was the only place you could see all these mutations and get a picture of what was possible. Everyone else was stuck in the Stone Age.” On weekends, Kobylka would visit his uncle, a physician in Georgia. “I was just talking about snakes constantly,” Kobylka said. “I drove him crazy.”
One day, his uncle offered to invest in a pair of pastel ball pythons, then top-tier morphs, and to split the profits if they produced salable offspring. They earned enough on the deal that Kobylka was able to persuade his uncle to buy a pied, which he went to fetch from a dealer in Florida. “I still remember driving home with that animal,” Kobylka told me. “I would stop by the side of the road to look at it every hour. And I just—” He exhaled, seemingly at a loss for words. “Amazement,” he said after a beat. (These days, ball pythons are sent between dealers and collectors using overnight mail carriers such as FedEx.) His uncle attached one condition to the purchase: the snake was too valuable to be left in Kobylka’s care, so it would live in a tank next to his uncle’s bed.
The early two-thousands were a good time to get into the business. McCurley had received a six-figure bid for three golden snakelets with webbing patterns, called “spider” morphs. The breeder Mike Wilbanks sold a “black-eyed Lucy”—a leucistic ball python—to a Belgian collector for two hundred thousand dollars. People were taking on debt to finance their ball-python purchases. “I had second mortgages on my house so I could have a hundred thousand dollars ready to go if that next new thing came out,” Wilbanks told me. “It was a big race.”
Like a new gadget, a morph might be faddish and expensive at first, but as it was sold widely its value would slide to an entry-level price point. Those rare ball-python traits first discovered in the wild and now known as base morphs had followed this trajectory. “They all became accessible,” Kobylka said.
He recalled thinking, “Wait a minute, there’s infinite possibilities if we just stack genes together.” He told me, “That’s where I got my jump on the industry.” In 2003, he launched his business, aiming for “combos,” mutations layered together, in order to produce singular dazzlers that could appeal to connoisseur breeders in the U.S. and internationally rather than to big-box pet stores. It would be a slow-release undertaking. “I wanted to imagine a morph combo in the future, and create it ten years later—that was what I was all about,” he said.
These days, Kinova’s yield is around fifteen hundred pythons a year, and Kobylka is seen as unrivalled in his artistry with genetic mutations, a breeder at the frontiers of the form. “You will never ever be able to catch Justin Kobylka,” Antoine Hood, of High Desert Pythons, in North Carolina, told me. “How can I parallel him? That’s a better endeavor.” Brittney Gobble, who breeds ball pythons in Tennessee, called Kobylka “a savant.” “He’s able to create a 3-D model, combining five or six mutations in his mind. And then eventually it gets made, and it looks like how he described it,” Gobble said. “It’s truly just insane.”
On a brisk October day, I went to the North American Reptile Breeders Conference in Tinley Park, where venders from around the country had set up booths. With most transactions taking place online, expos are seen as an opportunity to launch what Kobylka called “really cutting-edge things.” Many breeders showed their ball pythons in clear acrylic boxes on logo-printed paper; photographs of them would be automatically branded.
Kobylka had walked around the venue before it opened to the public, taking note of the competition, but now he couldn’t get more than a few steps away from the Kinova booth without being accosted by neophyte breeders and reptile enthusiasts. In the melee, I saw a buyer lightly rap the top of one of Kinova’s display cases and announce, “That’s the snake—that’s the showstopper.” It was the “sunset combo” morph, which had the bittersweet-orange sheen of heirloom glassware. Kobylka held court, fielding queries and dispensing advice. “Justin would take this off my hands in a second, if I let him,” a breeder who had brought a morph called “Cyborg” said. Emily Roberts’s fans had dressed in pink, and together they formed a shuffling, spangled queue. A woman in a sleek blazer was deftly handling a lustrous slate-blue snake, changing her grip the way a rappeller belays a top rope, hand over hand, as the snake cascaded without progress in the direction of the floor. “They can have quite a spicy temperament,” she declared. “They’re not for beginners.” At the booth for Best Dressed Balls—an Iowa-based venture run by a breeder named Troy Schroeder—a girl of nine patted the box in front of her, fixated on the creature inside. “Tell everyone he’s unlovable, Troy,” she pleaded, hoping to save up enough to bring it home.
An estimated six million households in the U.S. include at least one reptile. Millennials make up the largest group of reptile owners, but snakes, lizards, and turtles have become increasingly popular with Generation Z. “One of our concerns is that technology will take kids away from this world,” a breeder observed. “Why would a kid today want to peer at a snake through glass, when they can put a V.R. headset on and play with dinosaurs?” As much as the ball python seems to have been pulled into the technological infrastructure of the twenty-first century—featured in live streams, traded via MorphMarket—snake ownership was frequently portrayed at the expo as an antidote to the anomie of feeling ourselves to be part of a big machine. A 2015 poll of readers by Scientific American Mind found that snake owners were more likely than other pet owners to describe their animals as “part of the family.”
Some reptile owners clearly felt that more was more. Bob Clark was in the crowd, buzzing from the recent sale of five “retics” (reticulated pythons) to a customer in the Middle East, for half a million dollars. These snakes were so big that, once crated, a forklift had been needed to move them. Among breeders, the matter of snake size could be divisive. “One per cent of snake keepers are up to taking care of a snake that large, and not the other ninety-nine,” Kobylka said. He expressed unease at the rise of social-media accounts that sensationalize living with gigantic snakes, misrepresenting snake keeping as an extreme sport rather than a serious responsibility.
But the majority of collectors were there for the ball pythons. Although Python regius is not endangered in Africa, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (I.U.C.N.) has designated it as near-threatened, and the N.A.R.B.C. prohibits animals that aren’t captive-bred or “quality farm-raised” in the U.S. As I wandered through aisle upon aisle of ball pythons, I wondered if the line between the wild type and the captive-bred could be so easily demarcated. Rob Rausch, who is in charge of juvenile animals at Kinova, told me that he thought ball-python morphs took the pressure off wild-snake populations by satisfying people’s longing for exotic-looking reptiles. “You can go to the wild, and you can get a normal ball python. Or you can come here, and”—he made an openhanded gesture, as of a shopkeeper displaying his wares—“What color do you like? What pattern do you like?”
At the N.A.R.B.C., combos that were darker in tone reigned. I saw rows of axanthics, which are monochrome, in ash white, pewter, and black. There was a “hurricane” combo, with lightning slashes of electric yellow along its chocolate-brown sides. Then there were the ball pythons that hadn’t yet been conjured. Kobylka told me that he was hoping to make “a truly zebra-looking animal, with black and white stripes.” He added, “We visualize that, but the difficulty is that’d be a quadruple recessive. That’s many years out.” I had already seen, at the expo, designer “leopard” morphs, with the coloration of a spotted big cat, and there were also two much talked-about “gorilla” combos, which were dark with tortoise-shell ripples: as on fashion runways, there was a constant conflation of wildness with luxury.
Ball pythons have come to be seen as unnatural, hothouse creatures. At the conference, I frequently heard them described as “pet rocks”—that is to say, inert and highly collectible. “A snake is a snake,” Clark said. “You can’t make a dog out of it.” I appreciated the fact that many breeders seemed to resist anthropomorphizing their stock. But speaking of ball pythons as “pet rocks” seemed to ignore their fundamental creatureliness. “I’ve had people who have had five-thousand-dollar, ten-thousand-dollar snakes, who said they didn’t want to pay seventy-five dollars for an exam or treatment for that animal,” Mark Mitchell, a professor of zoological medicine in Louisiana, said. “People are much more apt to want to take care of an animal they view affectionately than those they consider commodities.”
Yet evolving into eye candy for humans has meant that designer ball pythons, when viewed at the species level, enjoy some of the evolutionary advantages of domestic animals, including wide dispersal. “There isn’t a single endangered species of domestic animal,” Marcelo Sánchez-Villagra told me. “Many have worldwide distribution.” With natural habitats disappearing all the time, finding a way to shelter within anthropic culture might be a good strategy. “What is a better ticket to survival than being beautiful and rare?” Clark said. “Those traits are going to be multiplied in future generations because that’s what people like, not because that’s what kept you from getting eaten.”
The evolutionary trade-offs borne by individual snakes in captivity, however, have, in some instances, been dire. Breeders once championed their field as a salve against the cruelties of shipping wild-foraged snakes, which can be at risk for dehydration, parasites, and increased disease transmission, but morphs aren’t always better off. Over time, breeders have discovered that several sought-after traits and specific gene-crossings also produce physical irregularities. Duckbill, in which a snake’s rostrum is upturned and flattened, is a benign deformity, but it is said that some morphs, such as the “caramel albino,” have a higher chance of producing young with spine kinks, a condition that can prevent them from moving sinuously, or can fatally obstruct digestion. “If we hatch a python with small eyes, we won’t sell it as a breeder,” Courtney Capps told me. “We sell those as pets only, because I don’t want the genetics to be passed on. Potentially, at some point, small eyes turn into no eyes.” Another condition that can be distressing is “wobblehead,” a tic that likely betrays neurological issues. Online, breeders have counselled against pairing morphs that are known to result in impairments. (“We want mutations that are just skin-deep,” Kobylka told me. “We don’t want the animal to be at all changed in any way that would hurt its ability to survive.”) But some unusual malformations, unrelated to breeding morphs, can be profitable windfalls: early in the new year, Clark sold a two-headed ball python for a hundred thousand dollars. “Both heads eat,” he assured me, when I inquired after its health.
At Kinova, I had asked Kobylka which was the rarest snake in the room, expecting to be shown something supremely expensive. As it turned out, though, the rarest snake was an endling, the last of its kind, and wouldn’t be sold. He retrieved it from a tray. The morph was called “desert,” a snake the color of burnt butter with a toothlike pattern. It was a variety that “everybody loved when it first came out,” he said, “but, if you try to breed them, the eggs will get stuck and they’ll die.”
Unsurprisingly, many snake experts are skeptical of the whole morph-making enterprise. “It’s ‘The Island of Doctor Moreau,’ ” the British herpetologist Neil D’Cruze told me. D’Cruze is the head of research at World Animal Protection International, and the senior co-author of “Snakes and Ladders,” a scientific paper on the ball-python trade, published in 2020. “The speed-breeding, the genetic manipulation, it’s being pushed out of the desire to create a new product. Not to help the snake cope better in captivity—to be a better pet for whoever owns it. Are these animals part of a genuine conservation program to help save the species? No.”
Some are concerned about the limits of our ability to envision what snakes need, and to act in their best interests. Eben Kirksey, an Oxford professor of anthropology who has written about python-breeding communities in the U.S., believes that seeing “past the dollar value of a snake with particularly colorful skin” would mean offering more to the snakes than racking trays. Breeders “talk about burrowing,” Kirksey said, “but the enclosures I’ve seen, they’re not like actual burrows. These are life-support technologies that people are cobbling together out of plastic, out of machines.” Were the snakes O.K. with all of this? “There are a lot of animals that, unfortunately for them, tolerate captivity well,” D’Cruze told me. “But suffering isn’t always overt. Suffering can be under the hood, invisible.” I had read that it was possible to gauge a python’s stress by measuring its blood cortisol, but as I walked around the expo I found myself troubled by the question of what thriving or discomfort looked like in a snake. Could a python raised in a tray, fed, kept warm and watered, and bred be said to live a full life?
In the meantime, the business of breeding rolls ever forward. When ball pythons were first becoming investment pieces, inevitably there were scams. One individual purported to have the world’s first entirely red ball python, and sold the python’s offspring—which were all black—to several U.S. concerns. As clutches laid by those snakes failed to contain any crimson hatchlings, vexed breeders agreed that they’d been conned. New technology promises to change all of that. A topic of fervent conversation at the expo was shed-testing, a kind of 23andMe for snakes, as Kobylka put it. “That’s where our industry is headed,” he said. The testing, which requires the tiniest scrap of molted snakeskin, offers designers a more rigorous way to verify traits. Brittney Gobble told me she had heard that artificial insemination might soon be available for ball pythons, which would expand the field exponentially. I imagined a world where creating new morphs would be a matter of transporting little vials of snake sperm, not the snakes themselves.
In one of our earliest conversations, Kobylka had said that he wanted “to make something that is genuinely beautiful to an average person. That’s my criteria—if the person on the street, who doesn’t like snakes, stops and says, like, ‘Whoa, that’s a snake?! I didn’t know a snake could look like that.’ ” But it was also possible to go too far. A scaleless morph, for example, has bald, matte skin, similar to a sphynx cat or a furless guinea pig. Many will recognize it as “the pinnacle of ‘unnatural,’ ” the veterinarian H. Kitt Hollister wrote in “The Ultimate Ball Python,” because it is “delicate, and seemingly unable to survive without human intervention.” The breeder responsible for the morph, Brian Barczyk, who died earlier this year, of pancreatic cancer, marketed it as “smooth and soft,” a completely different texture to touch. Kobylka told me that when he finally got to hold one he was perturbed. The scaleless snake seemed to break the boundaries of what a snake is. “They feel like human skin,” he said, shuddering at the memory. ♦
