Ball Python food down grade good or bad ?

[Mondre]

I have a normal baby ball python about 2-2.5 months old , when I first got him he poop what I believe was a fuzzy or hopper & after that I feed him 2 pinkies every five days & just last feeding I feed him 3. He eats like a monster but idk if I should go back to a fuzzy or hopper any ideas ???

P.s I don't have a scale to weigh him

[Artemille]

If you're feeding him 3 pinkies each time, you should start him on big pups.

[Stewart_Reptiles]

The majority of BP get started on hoppers so right now you are underfeeding your BP, at 2 and a half months old your BP can take a small adult / adult mouse.

All you need to do is eyeball it and feed a prey equal the girth size of your BP.

[angllady2]

Yes. Pinkies, rat or mouse, are much too small for any but the tiniest of hatchlings. I'm talking the 17-25 gram babies you see occasionally. I start out my hatchlings on just-out-of-hopper stage mice, and by their 8th or 9th feeding, they can easily handle a young adult mouse. That would be at roughly 2 1/2 - 3 months old. By 4 1/2 months they get adult mice, or similar sized rats when I have them.

These guys can eat much bigger prey than you think, and as babies, they need that extra nutrition to prevent being stunted or worse. I feed my babies every 5 days through about 5 months old. They won't get fat, they need all the nutrition they can get to develop normally. I've seen badly stunted ball pythons that were nothing short of starved as babies. And while they will recover for the most part, they rarely get to where they would have been if they had been fed properly.

As a really severe example, I once rescued a baby ball who was 8 months old and only weighed 60 grams. That is what newly hatched ball pythons weigh. The people who had him fed him one pinky mouse a month. It took many months of hard work to get him up to the range he should have been, and even then the effects of the starvation were evident. Now, I know you aren't that bad, so please don't think I am suggesting you are, I just want you to understand how bad it can be. And the scary thing is, when they are young and going through such rapid development, it doesn't take much to set them back.

Gale