I recently got my first boa imperator, Genesis, a beautiful little 2018 male Hypo Blood from Vin Russo. After giving him a week to settle into his new home, he had his first feeding yesterday and responded with gusto (which is delightful to me, as someone accustomed to the coaxing and wheedling that my BPs sometimes need, haha).
My dilemma is this: The feeder mice I have are too small, so I'm trying to decide how to space them out.
Vin told me this boy has been taking hopper mice every 10 days, but should be able to move up in size relatively soon. I bought a bag of f/t hoppers, but clearly I'm not used to eyeballing prey size for the narrower boa body type yet, or remembering to account for their longer feeding intervals, so now I have a supply of 19 small to medium sized hopper mice to get through. [facepalm] Unfortunately I don't have anyone else to feed these to, since my BPs are well beyond that size range and have already been switched to rats anyway.
Would it be reasonable to feed these too-small hoppers every 7 days instead of every 10 days, until the supply is exhausted, and then go up to the proper prey size and go back to feeding every 10 days (or every 14 days, as we'll probably have run into the winter months by then)? I don't want to accidentally overfeed him due to ignorance or overzealousness, but I also don't want to underfeed him as he's still quite small and young. I also want to take into account the fact that his morph is Central American in origin and is not going to be a very big boa to begin with, so some standard feeding guidelines may not necessarily apply.
Any thoughts would be appreciated! Here's a photo of Genesis from Vin, since I haven't wanted to pester him too much yet.
Reply With Quote