I think I am overfeeding but she is very enthusiastic at each feed
My ball python is 8 months old. So far we have had no issues with her. For the first 5 months she would eat every 6 days, and we slowly started feeding her more often as she seemed to be looking for food. We are currently feeding her 8g hopper mice every 3 days and im not sure if thats too often for her. She has a very skinny neck it seems and has to stretch a bit to get her current mice down so I am not sure she is ready to go up to the 12g mice. She has never refused a meal and will strike her mice within seconds each time, im just not sure if she is just greedy or actually hungry. We have her out almost every day roaming and she is active outiside her tank unless she is shedding. I have the most recent pictures of her.
https://i.imgur.com/uoKfUzp.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/morEi6O.jpg
Re: I think I am overfeeding but she is very enthusiastic at each feed
8g mice are extremely small for a BP of any age...
Hopper mice (8-12g) are usually only fed to a BP for its first few meals before sizing up to small adult mice (15-20g).
To me, it sounds like you're trying and failing to make up for underfeeding by doing it more often. Frequently feeding a snake can be extremely bad for them, so what you really need to do is feed appropriate prey weekly.
Weigh your snake on a (kitchen) gram scale. Then feed every 7 days a mouse or rat that is 10% of its body weight.
Also, size of the neck is irrelevant. If you were to feed by the diameter of something on a ball python it needs to be the diameter of its thickest part (the midsection of the body) matching the girth of the rodent fed.
If she needs prey more than one size larger, I'd suggest giving her at least 1 of the in between size to get her used to digesting a bit more at a time more gradually. (So if she needs adult mice, feed 1 small adult 1 week, then the full adult sized mouse the next week.)
Feeding chart used here
https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/201...9ef6e64f66.jpg
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Re: I think I am overfeeding but she is very enthusiastic at each feed
Thank you for the advice, we will go ahead and up her size of mice she is fed. She is currently 397 grams.
Re: I think I am overfeeding but she is very enthusiastic at each feed
I hate to come in here and notice something else but is that snake in sand substrate?
On the food aspect. I have a 300 ish gram female and she makes quick work of an adult mouse. Hoppers are way too small for that snake.
Re: I think I am overfeeding but she is very enthusiastic at each feed
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Moose84
I hate to come in here and notice something else but is that snake in sand substrate?
I think you're right.
Get rid of the sand and use only wood-based products like aspen, cypress, coco husk, etc. as substrates if you want a natural substrate. Do not use pine or black walnut.