A Simple Feeding Question. Advice is needed.

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Originally Posted by LGray23

You can feed multiples until they are gone then up the size if you'd like :)

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I 2nd that!!!

1) get a scale

2) weigh snake

3) weigh prey

4) feed 10-15% of her body weight every 5-7 days

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Originally Posted by HeadSetJones

Sorry if I'm rambling here. Just trying to keep my snake healthy and happy.

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IMO if it's eating on a regular basis and you see poop then I don't see any reason to change your feeding schedule for now. I would recommend feeding every 5-7 days for a juvenile and 2 should be fine. If you start seeing a bulge continue to be there after a few weeks then you could feed 1 hopper one week and the next week feed 2. The snake will know if it wants to and can eat more food.

One less facetious suggestion:

At some point you'll probably want to switch your snake over to rats. It's just less expensive (and easier) to feed one large food item than a bunch of smaller ones. Since most ball pythons in captivity more readily eat mice than rats, you might want to save one or two of your mice in the freezer. If your snake proves difficult to switch over initially, you could use the mice to scent the rats.

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Originally Posted by jfmoore

One less facetious suggestion:

At some point you'll probably want to switch your snake over to rats. It's just less expensive (and easier) to feed one large food item than a bunch of smaller ones. Since most ball pythons in captivity more readily eat mice than rats, you might want to save one or two of your mice in the freezer. If your snake proves difficult to switch over initially, you could use the mice to scent the rats.

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Joan makes a very good point. I do recommend you save a few... don't own any balls and would've never crossed my mind.

I got a scale and I weighed her. She's 192g so I fed her a 19g mouse today.

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Originally Posted by HeadSetJones

I got a scale and I weighed her. She's 192g so I fed her a 19g mouse today.

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Great! She's on her way, then. Bear in mind that most newly hatched ball pythons could handle a meal that size, so you might want to offer two of that size next time if you have more. Or step it up to a larger size. But, whatever, you're doing fine. For comparison, I have a 70 gram ball python that just ate a 20 gram mouse.

Yeah, I only fed her 10% of her weight. I would have fed two if I could find a combo of mice that came close to 28g's (15% of weight) but couldn't. :P Gonna step up a size after this bag of hoppers runs out.