BP Breeders - Do you keep your mature males and females in the same room?

I'm gonna chime in on this.

My biggest breeder male, a pastel at 1200 grams ate a small meal every other week all through the breeding season.

My two smallest breeding males ate an average of once a month maybe, sitting at 450 and 525 grams respectively.

My non breeding male at 650 grams, stopped eating completely.

I think it depends on the individual snake. I offered small meals to all my males, meaning most of the season they got adult mice instead of rats of any kind. Eating was pretty much hit and miss but I kept offering. I did find with the two smaller males offering food two days after I pulled them from the female encouraged eating to a degree.

Gale

My males also eat year round. They may miss a meal or two, but not much longer than that. They are housed in the same rack as the girls.

Just to add some more insight. I keep my breeder males in the same room as my females. However, I do breed some of the younger males from my other room (they are in an ARS hatchling rack). I find that animals from either room act the same.

As far as going off feed, I have had different experiences than most on here. My males do go off feed for about 6-7 months as a general rule. However, quite a few of my males will only eat 4 or 5 meals per year. These are animals that will breed 6-8 females a year and this does not affect them.

With that said, as Jon mentioned above, "athletic" males get the job done better. I strive to keep my males at the 900 gram range. This doesn't mean that I will unnaturally starve one that has genes that want to make him bigger, but I do drop the males back to a 1 meal / 21 day schedule starting at about 600 grams. This seems to work well for me.

I hope that helps,