Ball Python Serpentovirus (Nidovirus) 2025

Science in the reptile hobby seems to be headed in a stagnant direction this year. It is somewhat expected as our current world is covered in anti-scientific rhetoric from extreme political activists like RFK Jr. taking to stages to make very wild claims. It is unsurprising that animal industries are not keen on continuing most of these conversations during such a time.

YouTubers and social media influencers continue the same pursuit of RFK Jr. aligned pseudoscience. Sunlight and vitamin D are the answer for anything that ails a reptile, it seems, and it should be a matter of time until reptiles are sent to wellness camps or something.

Updates to Our Own Material

Resolve Reptiles previously published an article at Nidovirus Prevention and Protection Measures for Ball Pythons which made a claim of a nidovirus vaccine.

This is absolutely not true.

Resolve Reptiles, custom code, articles, and research are done with tools like Obsidian and other great open source software. The "vaults" (Obsidian's concept of notebook) include Resolve Reptiles and several other sites not related and/or not owned by Resolve. At some point it seems like SEO tools and reformatting tools were inadvertently run on Resolve Reptiles. Resolve Reptiles is currently a side-side-side-side-side project for the author.

That seems to have added a vaccination notice that aligns with ex: pandemic data including vaccinations.

We apologize for the mistake and will be moving Resolve Reptiles to a different location free from automated tools other sites use.

Interesting Coverage This Year

If you missed it in 2023, there was a paper with names that you might find on Resolve Reptiles like Stephen Tillis, Justin Julander, and Robert J. Ossiboff.

Stephen Tillis has mentioned several times that he has been innovating around culturing heart cells from pythons to perform assays with. This paper seems to be a result of some of those cultures.

In Vitro Characterization and Antiviral Susceptibility of Ophidian Serpentoviruses includes some very clear information. The most interesting take away for most is the testing of common disinfectants. Oddly it seems they did not test detergent or soap, which is known to be very effective against coronaviruses, but they did sample others including F10, Chlorhexidine, and others.

One minute contact time was sufficient to completely (100%) neutralize the infectious potential of the tested serpentoviruses for 10% bleach, 70% ethanol, and 2% chlorhexidine. The quaternary ammonium compound (QAC) was able to neutralize 100% of AnPSV and GTSV in one minute, while BPNV was reduced by 95 ± 11% SE. [...]

This is guidance for topics like Sanitation and Reptiles with clear guidance on disinfectants. As expected, 10% bleach is cheap, easy, accessible, and effective.

The antivirals section is probably not useful to many readers. It would not be appropriate and would be very dangerous to attempt to administer an antiviral reigim for your captive pets.

If you would prefer a video version you can find it here with the timestamp near 1:40:00

While this isn't news for 2025, it's the most recent talk in the hobby about these serpentovirus in general. The hosts do identify that serpentovirus is pervasive and harmful in the hobby which is a very refreshing and accurate statement.

Justin Julander specifically mentions, as Resolve and others have mentioned, there does not seem to be any evidence that nidovirus has any vertical transmission route (from mother to offspring). This is, once again, an indicator that hobbyists should continue to use artificial incubation to avoid transfer of the virus. To be clear, the hatched snake can become infected by serpentovirus from its parents if it is exposed to those parents after hatching - vertical transmission is specifically during the egg laying/birthing process.

As mentioned here before, fomites are the general transmission method of the disease. In the video, Justin Julander directly addresses that you should consider your gloves, tools, and yourself as a method for transfer. He also suggests that the myth that these diseases would "jump" between racks is probably not true with the transmission of the virus most likely being through contact with infected material transferred between enclosures by the keeper.

Reminders About Serpentovirus

When we talk about serpentovirus, it is important to remember the context of both the paper and this article (which is specifically titled to mention ball pythons).

Serpentoviruses have been found in many common pet reptiles from western hognose snakes to blue tongue skinks - in those cases there is no indication that these viruses cause disease but there isn't much research. For green tree pythons, ball pythons, and other commonly kept pet pythons, we know that serpentovirus infections can be fatal.

It is important to understand these things are not the same.

It is also important to understand that when the paper says, for example, "some serpentoviruses are pathogenic and potentially fatal", that does not somehow generalize to there being some sort of beneficial nidovirus. That's the wrong conclusion.

Reminders About UV, Temperature

Ultraviolet Light has been used to sterilize many things, and the paper and discussion above does talk about cell cultures, but were not included in this paper.

It is important to remember that the disinfectents were tested with cell cultures. There would be no way to test UV with these cultures.

If you exposed these cultures to high temperatures and/or high UV, that will absolutely kill the virus - but it will also kill the cells in the culture. It is extremely easy to kill things in a petri dish.

In spite of hobby "common sense", there is still no indication that these methods are useful or effective at preventing these viruses in collections.

Carpet Python Keepers Still Leading the Charge

CarpetFest helped to fund research into these diseases.

There is no such initiative from Snake Discovery or New England Reptile. There is little investment from ball python breeders or social media entities to try to help with this research.

The 95F Myth, "Thermal Treatment"

The paper talks about temperatures the virus can sustain at. The YouTube video talks about keeping actual animals at 95F to "clear" serpentovirus. Justin Julander pushes back against this method.

Increasing an animal to this temperature can be dangerous. Cooking the nido out is most likely not a real thing.

To keep the virus at 95F, you would need to uniformly keep the entire animal at 95F. Most likely that means the rest of the enclosure is at a higher temperature. This is extremely dangerous and will injure your animals if done incorrectly.

There is no indication or correlated research that you can kill a virus infection by simply keeping an animal (including a human) at a specific temperature. This isn't how disease works in any other animals and it is very surprising to see reptile keepers assume that reptiles "work different" than any other animal.

At best they are most likely seeing a recession of symptoms and not curing the disease in any way. They are masking the symptoms of the disease, which is extremely common in our industry for everything from crypto to serpentovirus, and not curing the viral infection.

To compare to a human virus, you cannot cook the hepatitis C out of a person. That's not a treatment. To suggest you can just keep any animal in the equivalent of a sauna and magically cure every virus is very strange.

It is unknown why the reptile hobby falls for such strange pseudoscience.

Conclusion

It is very good to see serpentovirus being acknowledged and new papers being published by familiar faces.

The reptile industry is subject to PhDs that have no published papers making wild claims about being able to sterilize racks with built-in UV - and that's insane. That is not good information consumption.

Justin Julander, Stephen Tillis, and Robert J. Ossiboff are well respected actual researchers that continue to help research move forward.