How many female rats do i need for 15 Ball Pythons?

[NewBornBreeder]

Okay so I recently just finished welding a 4 tier metal rat rack together at work and the tubs are the medium sized concrete mixing tubs from home depot (27.5" x 20"). I currently have 11 females & 6 males total. 2 tubs have 1:4 ratio's and the other 2 bins are separated by sex because the females aren't ready yet. I have 2 males that are ready now and 2 small males that will replace the bigger ones when they are ready and when all is said and done I plan on having 1:4 ratio's in each tub. What I would like to know is will 16 female rats be enough to feel my BP collection? I only have 3 BP's under 800g one being a 2 month hatchling, the other 2 being over 250g and my biggest is 1800g. I like to offer feeders weekly regardless if their taken or not and I don't plan on holding any ratties back unless their's a female that has a cool looking pattern. Is there a generalized rat breeding ratio per BP? Any help and advice will be greatly appreciated.

[cchardwick]

A lot depends on how often you feed and if you keep your male rats with the females all the time or separate them. If you separate them you'll need twice the number of rodents (3 weeks to weaning), if you give them additional resting periods then add some more. If you feed every five days vs. 10 days you'll need twice the number of rodents. They generally say you need one rat per snake. I've found that the hard part is getting rodents the right size for all the snakes, you almost need extra rodents to ensure you have the proper sizes or euthanize and freeze them at a certain size for use later. And if you let them get too big you'll need a bigger snake like a boa or dwarf retic to eat all the expired breeders and offspring that grow too big before you can feed them off. I was actually giving away my jumbo male rats at one point. Now my 10+ pound dwarf retic pounds them down LOL. I like to have mice on hand because you can keep the adults for a long time and they never get too big for your snakes.

You can make a rough estimate, if you keep the males with the females you can expect 10-16 babies every 4-5 weeks, so lets say you get 12 babies every six weeks, that's two rats per week. I'd say that's about right, you will want extra just in case, you can freeze them or sell them or give them away, just don't want to run short. I have 16-20 tubs for 20 snakes, but I also have several colonies of mice. It seems that I'll have an abundance of mice, then when that runs out I'll have an abundance of rats LOL. You will want to keep a few in the freezer just in case you don't have the right size for a week or two.

Keep in mind that if you have too many you can always feed several smaller rodents per snake in one feeding to use them up. Also the breeding or off seasons will throw you for a loop. If half of your snakes stop eating you will quickly get over run with rodents, I've been there HA! One time I was overrun with literally hundreds of mice. I had to actually remove my males from the tanks to stop production for awhile. And then all my females got too old all at the same time and all stopped breeding (except one mouse LOL). I'm literally starting over again with the young, this time I'm building one colony per week so the babies are spread out a bit.

[B3N]

Could you post pics of your rack?

[Stewart_Reptiles]

For the proper rotation you need 1 female rat per snake.

You should avoid breeding rats in harem because it takes it's toll rapidly on females since they are pregnant and nursing, litters size become smaller so are the babies which grow at a smaller rate too.

For proper rotation which means producing consistently every week you have to consider that

2 females a week will produce 12 to 24 babies a week the process will take 3 to 4 weeks between breeding and gestation + an additional 3 weeks before the animals are weaned that is 6 to 7 weeks if you need smaller feeders you can reduce that to 5 to 6 before your female goes back in rotation.