Aspen Bedding? Risk of impaction?

Just wondering what all of you thought on this topic. For the 5 years I've been keeping ball pythons I've always kept them on reptile bark or more recently, newspaper. Lately I've been toying around with aspen bedding, and they really seem to enjoy it. (All of my hatchlings seem a lot less restless)

So, I've noticed while feeding F/T some of the bedding always ends up getting stuck to the rodent. My question being, what is the risk of impaction in hatchlings?

As far as I know Aspen bedding is digested by ball pythons, I have kept balls on aspen before and never had problems. Someone please correct me if im wrong though

It's not digested, it's just easily passed through the system. As long as gobs of it aren't being stuffed down their throats they should be fine, but there are accidents that happen with everything.

I monitor my ball python when I'm feeding so if I see a piece of aspen sticking to the prey as he goes to swallow, I just reach in there with tongs and pull it off. No big deal.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mercerasian

I monitor my ball python when I'm feeding so if I see a piece of aspen sticking to the prey as he goes to swallow, I just reach in there with tongs and pull it off. No big deal.

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X2

Although, when you get so many balls it gets a little more tough to monitor them all on feeding day, if the majority eat lol

Ball Pythons
0.3 Normals (Coilette, Athena and Mary Jane)
1.0 Pastel (De Sol)
1.0 Spider (Zeus)
1.0 Mojave (Prometheus)

Boa Constrictors
0.1 Brazilian Rainbow Boa (Stella)
0.1 BCI (Kiyoko)
0.1 Dumerils Boa (Gloria)

It's been discussed God knows how many times in this forum.

It's nothing to be concerned about.