John George Children described several species of insects and animals while working at the British Museum in London, England, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Children also conducted research on chemical batteries called voltaic cells and briefly studied and manufactured gunpowder. One of the species he described, the Children’s python, or Antaresia children, was used in the twenty-first century as the subject of experiments that involved the biological cost of reproduction in snakes. Those experiments helped examine the importance of thermoregulation during gestation as a possible reason for the evolution of live birth in previously egg-laying species. By researching the Children’s python, Children contributed to the many species of animals used to research reproductive physiology.

In 2013, Olivier Lourdais, Sophie Lorioux, and Dale DeNardo conducted a study on the impact of the reproductive effort on the muscle size and the constriction strength of female Children’s pythons. Children’s pythons are pure capital breeders, meaning that they do not eat during vitellogenesis, a process in which egg-laying or oviparous species allocate bodily resources including fat, water, and protein to follicles in the ovary that develop into eggs. In their study, the researchers aimed to identify the biological tradeoffs associated with a species that uses only stored bodily resources to allocate toward the development of embryos. The researchers found that female Children’s pythons undergoing vitellogenesis experienced significant muscle loss and constriction strength loss. The researchers’ findings make up an important element in assessing the fitness of a species in the wild as fitness is determined by survivability and ability to reproduce. Additionally, because Children’s pythons have especially low metabolic rates, and the energy constraints associated with reproduction in Children’s pythons are applicable to many other python species.