Meet the Green tree python
In Australia, this jewel-green python lives only in a small patch of rainforest on eastern Cape York, an estimated area of about 2,300 square kilometres across the Iron, McIlwraith and Kawadji-Ngaachi ranges. Studies there found densities of hundreds of snakes per square kilometre in good habitat.
Hatchlings are lemon-yellow or occasionally red. At Iron Range, yellow juveniles were found to change to green over just 5 to 10 days, at about 58 to 60 cm long and roughly a year old.
By day the green python rests in a tidy saddle of coils draped over a branch with its head in the middle. At night it ambushes prey, mainly rodents, using the heat-sensing pits along its lips.
Hermann Schlegel described the species in 1872 from the Aru Islands. Genetic work has shown a separate northern New Guinea lineage, and the Australian snakes belong to the southern lineage that keeps the name Morelia viridis.
Where it lives
In Australia it is restricted to the rainforests of the Iron, McIlwraith and Kawadji-Ngaachi ranges on eastern Cape York Peninsula, Queensland; the species also occurs in southern New Guinea and the Aru Islands.