How do you feel about "maintenance diets"???

i think the professional breeders have quite a strong incentive to keep an optimal feeding regiment, simply because people pay more for well-started babies, and for subadults people pay more if they have more weight.

so when it comes to cutting corners and cutting costs, it will likely be other things, like enclosure size, substrate, hygiene.

adults can get overweight, but babies grow out of it or make up for it by growing faster.

edit: oh, an how i feel about it? i think they should be fed every 5 or every 7 days. you can feed less by feeding smaller size, but im not a fan of these random gaps. im also not a fan of powerfeeding BPs up to breeding size in the minimal amount of time possible.

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Originally Posted by SquamishSerpents

And another point regarding feeding "gaps." I tell people flat out, sometimes when I feed all the babies, I forget to stamp down the dates they ate. Simple as that. Same with sheds. Or I tell myself I will remember who shed, who ate, and who refused and then at the end I'm thinking "oh who am I kidding I messed it up already" and I don't stamp cards because I don't want to guess. I am just BAD at record keeping. I haven't found a good system yet that works. (Still looking!)

So, poor record keeping could also be at play for your gaps in feeding.

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i actually had a deposit to put a hold on this snake. Gaps and bad recordkeeping or not, this animal was def underweight when i got it.

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I feed babies once a week, sometimes more if they seem to need it, and more if all I have on hand are relatively small prey items.

My adults eat every 10 to 14 days, sometimes more often if the prey items are small, definitely on the further end if the prey items are large. Usually it's every 10 days, and my adult snakes are fed medium rats at the largest. Lately it's been easier to get large rats, so I offer those every 14 days instead.

Babies are offered something every week, though.

Some other species of snakes can get quite fat even as babies, to be fair. My first experience keeping a kingsnake right after highschool was to inadvertently make it the most obese kingsnake I had or have ever seen since. I fed it whenever it'd come out and look hungry - so from the time it was a hatchling until I realized what I'd done, I was feeding it every 2 to 3 days, except for a 2 week period when it would shed. This snake had ROLLS it was so fat.

In the end I had to cut it back significantly on food and take it out daily for exercise...and it was still the fattest kingsnake I'd ever seen. Sold it a few years ago to someone who loved its fatness, not sure where it is now but I hope it is happily living out its chubby existence.

-Jen

I'm not sure if this is the norm but I fast my snakes every couple of months. What I've noticed from my own observations in my small collection is that every once in awhile my snakes get finicky about eating and start refusing a bit. I won't feed for 2-3weeks and then after that they pickup the pace and they're all eating fine again. I only do this 2-4 times a year. I'm not sure if that sounds normal or if anyone else does it but it works well for me.

We offer babies food once a week, but I find we get refusals quite a bit on this schedule, and thus babies actually eat every 10-14 days or so. Because of refusals and shedding, I do at times have babies that have gaps as long as 30 days in their feeding card, but that doesn't mean I didn't offer food.

I also have had picky babies that have gaps in feeding, have been assist fed, and as a result of this have been underweight until they really get going. So I don't necessarily think there was malicious or neglectful intent, but I personally don't offer up babies for sale until they are well established feeders, unless they are going to someone with a lot of hatchling experience and they aren't being shipped.

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Originally Posted by LLLReptile

I feed babies once a week, sometimes more if they seem to need it, and more if all I have on hand are relatively small prey items.

My adults eat every 10 to 14 days, sometimes more often if the prey items are small, definitely on the further end if the prey items are large. Usually it's every 10 days, and my adult snakes are fed medium rats at the largest. Lately it's been easier to get large rats, so I offer those every 14 days instead.

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consider keeping the intervals to a minimum of 5 days for young ones/subadults, and 7 days for an adult. dont feed more often just because food on hand is smaller.... in that case, just give a second food item 20 minutes later, maybe even a third.

people have tried out what works better, going from a 7-day cycle to a 3-4 day cycle, or sticking to the 7 day cycle and bumping up the food size. and with the same amount of food, results appear to be better if you stick to the 7 day cycle. In the experiments the snakes that are on the 7 day regiment grow faster than the ones fed more often, with exactly the same amount of food overall.

with large food items and adults, going to 10 or 14 days should be fine if you dont want to breed.

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Originally Posted by Kurtilein

consider keeping the intervals to a minimum of 5 days for young ones/subadults, and 7 days for an adult. dont feed more often just because food on hand is smaller.... in that case, just give a second food item 20 minutes later, maybe even a third.

people have tried out what works better, going from a 7-day cycle to a 3-4 day cycle, or sticking to the 7 day cycle and bumping up the food size. and with the same amount of food, results appear to be better if you stick to the 7 day cycle. In the experiments the snakes that are on the 7 day regiment grow faster than the ones fed more often, with exactly the same amount of food overall.

with large food items and adults, going to 10 or 14 days should be fine if you dont want to breed.

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Thanks for the advice, but my snakes are doing quite well (and have done so for many years) on the regime I have them on. :)

What experiments are you referencing, though? I'd love to read the papers those are in.

-Jen