what happened to my spider??? LONG READ

kind of a long story here. i got my 1.0 spider back on 2/5/10 @ 431 grams. he ate every saturday since unless he happened to be in deep blue, in which case he ate when he was done with his shed. (i feed all my snakes in their cages)

he refused his first meal on 7/25 @740 grams. and continued to refuse for the next several weeks. i know they do this so i wasnt overly worried about it.
his cage is right next to a 1500 gram virgin female, so i started to think maybe he was getting the "urge to merge". so i put em together for a couple days. he couldn't have been less interested.

i had been looking for signs of sickness since the first refusal and never found anything, held him tail up listening for crackles. i even put his head in a drinking glass to amplify the smallest noises, nothing. checked his mouth, looked normal.

i will note that every time i offered food he acted like we was going to eat. he would go into his strike pose and start respiring like he always did right before he laid the the hand of death on all the asf's that entered his cage. only after a min or so of strike pose he'd turn his head and lay down. i tried smaller rats, tried mice, tried fresh killed and nothing

by 9/8 he'd lost over 40 grams and i was worried. i decided that night i was gonna call the vet the next day. i stood outside his cage looking in for awhile thinking "what is wrong with you". temps are good, humidity is good, no signs of being sick, nothing inside the cage has changed. i decided to try and feed again. same old strike pose and lay down thing.

so i took the rat out and tossed it into an empty cage on the bottom. empty as in no bedding, hides etc. after a couple minutes i got the idea to put the spider in there with it, cant hurt to try right. it wasn't 10 seconds and he put something on that rat formula 409 couldn't take off. he finally ate, the rat was pretty small so we offered another and boom no sooner than the rats feet hit the floor of the cage he had the swollen eye syndrome.

so we continued to feed this way for the last several weeks, he still will not eat in his cage but no problems when moved to the empty one. he has put his weight back on and then some.

i cant help but wonder what caused this change. would he have starved himself to death? im glad he's back to weight but i feel bad and stupid for not trying it sooner.

sorry for the long post but i didn't want to leave anything out. anyone have any ideas or experiences on this type of thing?
thanks, james

Hi James,
I haven't experienced that particular phenomenon of having a BP prefer a separate cage for eating, but good for you for figuring out a novel way to get him to eat. I have had BPs decide to stop eating, refuse every trick in the book, and then start eating once I change their location in the rack or moved them to a different rack altogether. Sometimes it's a change to a slighter smaller tub, a very slightly warmer or cooler one, or a different place/type of rack altogether (I have both Freedeom Breeders and Animal Plastics racks of different sizes.). Maybe there is something about that feeding cage that makes him more comfortable. I wonder what would happen if you just permanently moved his quarters?
Anyway, I'm glad he's eating for you!

I probably won't be much help but wondered if you changed anything in his cage around the time he went off-feed?? My big girl did the same thing yours did when we took her stick out and forgot to put it back in. She refused her meals for three months! We put the stick back in and she promptly ate at the next offering. Now I don't even so much as mover her stick unless I just HAVE to.

we didnt change a thing in his cage. it seemed to me that his weight loss was pretty rapid given the short amount of time. im curious even about how fast he put it back on. i thought my scales were off but checked all my other snakes and they were right in line with where they were and i checked it against a 1k calibrating weight. it too was right on. i dunno

Thanks for sharing your story! I can't even begin to guess why it worked out the way it did....but the next time I hear of a long fast in which all other "tricks" have failed, I'll be sure to mention this story. This was a new one for me...very strange!

I have a cornsnake who won't eat in his own cage at all. I have to put him in an empty "spare" cage for him to eat. Some snakes are just weird I think. I guess they like to go to the restaurant to eat instead of having take out. :D

40 grams isn't as much as you think. Weigh the rats you feed him, and compare. May just be that most of the weight loss was due to a large defecation.

They are all individuals--I once had a hatchling that wouldn't eat until I put him in a larger bin...the opposite of most ball pythons.

I am just going to add a thought, my spider very close to yours in age a bit bigger but not much (700gm) is a bit fussy too. I found that pre senting the room helps can it be that placing the rat in a tub in the room for a while got things happening rather than the new location? Just a thought...