Second RHP or heat tape for BCI

Yeah, you will need to add heat tape to the floor of the cold side if your RHP got to 100+ and was running full power 24/7.

As for your boa looking thin, its only one pic but to me, it looks fine. It has the nice muscle line running down the side of its body. Looks like it should be on weaned rats but again hard to judge from a pic. Keep the food item same thickness or slightly thinner than the snake and if it is anything above mice, then once every 2-4 weeks. I do every 2 weeks for weaned/small rats, 3 weeks for medium rats and 4 weeks for large rats.

And your snake doesnt look round to me. It does look hypo ad from what i have been told, hypos can look more round but that is just the nature of hypos. You want to make sure the top of the back is fairly flat. Boas will store fat on either side of the top of their back so if your boa has what looks like the Grand Canyon down its back with the bottom of the canyon being the spine, then your boa is overweight. Also like i mentioned, you want to look for the nice muscle line down the flanks of the animal which yours has. It is very hard to underfeed a boa. Snakes are designed to go months without food in the wild and often do as well as going 3+ months without food normally in the winter.

And thanks, I do love my suri.

If you have ever seen a truly starved boa, you can clearly see it. I would bet over 75% of the people who own boas overfeed them, myself included when i first got into boas. They always act hungry so you think they need to eat.

Anyways, to give you an example, here is my 4 year old sunglow and you can see she kind of looks round in the pic but she was getting a medium rat every 4 weeks. She just recently got upsized to large rats every 4 weeks.
https://ball-pythons.net/forums/cach...b297de84_h.jpg

Thanks for all the info! :gj: I was told she's a salmon, which is very similar looking to hypo

What's adult weight / girth usually like for female columbians?

She's been super docile and friendly but I haven't handled any snakes larger than a 1500 gram ball python so I'm curious how big I should be expecting

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Forgotten

Thanks for all the info! :gj: I was told she's a salmon, which is very similar looking to hypo

What's adult weight / girth usually like for female columbians?

She's been super docile and friendly but I haven't handled any snakes larger than a 1500 gram ball python so I'm curious how big I should be expecting

---

A salmon is a hypo. It's just a line breed of hypo from Rich Ihles. If you go back and look at the pic of my hypo boy, he is a salmon 100% het sharp snowglow(anery and sharp albino).

As for girth and weight, it depends on the snake really but my 6.5 ft female normal BCI at last weigh in at the vet was 12.7 lbs and she is probably 3/4 the thickness of a pop can.

For size, most BCI will top out around 7-8 feet for a female and 6-7 feet for a male. Snakes never stop growing but boas slow down considerably after about 3-4 years.

And they generally are pretty laid back. My normal girl was scared at her first vet visit and wrapped around my neck and shoulders when the vet tried to take her to give her an exam lol. Then she wrapped around my arm and wouldnt let go. The vet finally said you hold her and i'll do the exam since as long as Rosey was on me, she didnt care who touched or poked her and she actually liked looked at the new stuff. The vet made a joke about how i must take good care of my animals as they all love dad. the first time my beardie got a check up, she got so scared, she pooped all over the nurses shoes, the exam table and then leaped off the table onto me and ran up my shirt and hid under my chin, poking her head out to look at the vet and nurse lol. We all know it was just because i was the 'safe spot' or familiar safe object in the room but we still joked about how they love dad.

But anyways, i would expect your boa to reach about 7 feet if its a female but you are looking at around 5-6 years for that assuming you feed it correctly and dont overfeed or powerfeed.

I have a Pro Panel on my cool side to bring up the temps. Its set on 80 and keeps the cool side floor 77.8 on a cold nights and runs a low % days keeping it 79.6/80*.
Works awesome this way and you can just add a larger water bowel to raise Humidity. I have a 5qt water Bowel from Tractor Supply Plus on my Hot Side and I add a 2.5qt on cool side during winter. I get 58-68% depending how full the bowels are.