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Chawna Schuette / Saint Louis Zoo / AP
The ball python huddled around its eggs.
Experts at a U.S. zoo are trying to figure out how a 62-year-old ball python laid seven eggs despite not being near a male python for at least two decades.
Mark Wanner, herpetology manager at the St. Louis Zoo, said it is unusual but not uncommon for ball pythons to reproduce asexually. Snakes also sometimes store sperm to delay fertilization.
Birth is also unusual because ball pythons generally stop laying eggs long before they reach their 60s, Wanner said.
“It would definitely be the oldest snake we know of in history,” for laying eggs, Wanner said, noting that it is the oldest snake ever documented in a zoo.
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The python, which has not been given a name, laid the eggs on July 23.
Three of the eggs remain in an incubator, two were used for genetic sampling and the snakes from the other two eggs did not survive, the St. Louis after shipment reported. Eggs that survive should hatch in about a month.
Genetic sampling will show whether the eggs reproduced sexually or asexually, which is called facultative parthenogenesis.
The only other ball python in the zoo’s herpetarium is a male around 31 years old. The snakes are not in public view.
The private owner delivered the female to the zoo in 1961. She laid a clutch of eggs in 2009 that did not survive.
Another clutch hatched in 1990, but those eggs could have been conceived with the male because at that time, the snakes were being placed in buckets together while keepers cleaned their cages.
