for those of you with mousers..

my little bumblebee is a pig and loves to eat. lol she hasn't refused a mouse i've dropped in there yet. i still need to get a gram scale for her so i know what she's sitting at. i've offered her two rats so far and she's shown no interest. i'm not worried about it yet because the only rats i can get from our local pet store are still pretty big and i don't think she's quite big enough for them yet. on the other hand, the mice they have are tiny. i need to find a local rodent breeder.. lol

right now she gulps down 3 mice every feeding like it's nothing. keep in mind these are fairly small mice.. but it got me wondering, for those of you with full grown balls that'll only eat mice, how many mice do you usually feed on feeding day? i could see a stubborn mouser getting to be somewhat expensive. lol

My spider is ~1000 grams and she's probably only taken 2-3 rats in the time I've had her (since she was a baby). Since she won't take more than 2 mice per feeding (she's quirky -sigh-) I do 2 jumbo mice per feeding about every 4-5 days. My wish would be for her to be on small/medium rats 1x a week but since her 2 mice a feeding is underfeeding for her size I feed her more frequent.

My mouser is a normal male. Except for the last few months, when he's gone into winter, "I smell ladies!" mode, he was being offered either two very large jumbo mice 15 minutes apart, or two a week on different days. He's from my '10 clutch and weighs the same as his brothers who are on rats -- they're all between 1300 and 1400 grams.

My big male normal is strictly a live mouse only eater. He will only two at a time so like Daybreaker I have to feed him every 5 days. I have tried rats with this boy and he absolutely does not like rats. I am just glad that he eats for me at all.

My albino male is 1500 grams and he eats 2 or 3 adult mice a week.

I've heard of adult female mousers going for 6 or 7 full-sized mice at the start of breeding season. My girl would take as many as 4 and be hungry again a week later the year before I finally switched her over to rats.

I only have one mouser, 900 gram yellowbelly het clown female, she eats 2 mice every 3 or 4 days.
She's 16 months old and at 900 grams a bit behind the rat eaters, but acceptable considering she's a mouser :rage:

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Originally Posted by loonunit

I've heard of adult female mousers going for 6 or 7 full-sized mice at the start of breeding season.

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wow 6 or 7 in the same feeding day? lol when i first started going to my local pet store their mice were a little bigger, but it seems like the past couple months all the mice have been tiny (and i'm still paying the same price i did for the bigger ones). they don't really have a selection of different sizes. they have "feeder mice" and "feeder rats." the two times i tried rats i picked out the smaller one of the bunch, but it was always WAY bigger than these tiny mice i'm getting now.. which is making me think it might make the switch a little more difficult.

what's the best way to go about finding a local breeder? i'm in Tennessee. we don't exactly have a bunch of local reptile shows around here. lol