Feeding

[Gaby1128]

So I have a ball python and she's like two and a half feet and we've had her almost two months and she eats really good she's never missed a week, she was on fuzzies before we got her and I moved her up to medium mice and now she's on adult mice and she just scarves them down and she hasn't pooped in about two weeks but she's eating, I feel like she shouild be eating more often? I hear that young BPs could eat 2 times a week? Also sometimes her belly looks like she could handle a bigger mouse and sometimes it looks like the adult mice are perfect

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[JodanOrNoDan]

Judging by the picture that animal could manage small rats weekly.

[tttaylorrr]

she looks thin imo. what's her weight? and her age? i'd try to switch over to rats asap; they're more nutrient-dense. whenever beeps eat you should see a bit of a bulge, but not like they swallowed a football. i'm sure your snake can take a bigger meal.

[Craiga 01453]

What tttaylorrr said

[Kcl]

There's not really a significant nutritional difference between rats and mice based on most sources. Still good to switch them early so you don't run into problems with having to feed multiple mice to an adult.

That being said, weighing your snake and then weighing the feeders and giving ones that are ~10-15% of the snakes weight is a pretty fool proof option for young ball pythons. It's excellent for people like me who are well, less than great at spatial things :/ If you have a bunch of frozen mice already, there's no issue with offering multiple mice that weigh ~10-15% of the snake's weight together. Meals of multiple prey items or larger prey items are (with some decent evidence) believed to be better than more frequent meals for most snake species. Digestion is relatively taxing. In at least one species, they've been shown to raise their body temperature by a degree or two during digestion solely through metabolic processes.

[tttaylorrr]

There's not really a significant nutritional difference between rats and mice based on most sources. Still good to switch them early so you don't run into problems with having to feed multiple mice to an adult.

TIL. thanks for your input!

[Kcl]

TIL. thanks for your input!

Yup - Rodent pro actually has a pretty nice chart on the values. They're a bit different but not too much, especially when you consider that we don't actually know what ball pythons need. Pretty unlikely to be significant. Juvenile rat vs adult mouse is actually very very close. Buut you don't really want to be feeding 3++ mice to an adult ball python because that's a hassle, more effort for the snake, and more expense for you as well as some snakes not being willing to take it.

What actually would make more of a difference in nutrition values is probably what the rodents are being fed vs whether it's a rat or a mouse. My guess is rodentpro feeds their rats and mice pretty similarly so you'd probably have a bigger difference in nutrition between mice from different vendors than between the rat and mouse from the same vendor.

http://www.rodentpro.com/qpage_articles_03.asp