Weight gain and swapping to a 14 day schedule

[Hugsplox]

Hello all,

So my male BP will be a year old next month. This is my second BP and the first that I've raised from a month old onward, so I'm new to handling weight gain and feeding changes in a younger constrictor. I wanted to get some opinions on weight gain and when you guys chose, if you did, to swap to a 14 day feeding schedule over a 7 day. To give you guys some details, my guy over the past 6 months as gained about 400 grams, and as of today is sitting at 652 grams.

About a month ago I decided to go ahead and swap over to a 14 day schedule, which worked out well because he went into shed a few days before what would have been his last weekly feeding day. Body shape wise I don't think he's too thick based on our body-size chart we regularly share here, but still I'm aware of how easy it is to overfeed and have obese snakes in captivity, so I'm trying to be cautious.

You guys forgive me if I'm asking silly questions, I was doing some research last night and saw some pictures of BPs so heavy that I could have sworn it was abuse, so I of course started second guessing everything that I thought I knew. Anyway, I'd love to hear about your feeding schedules, how your BPs gained weight over their life if you kept records, and what you're doing now to ensure you're not overfeeding.

Thanks guys!

[nikkubus]

As a general rule this is what I do, but I adjust it for individual animals as needed:

-fresh hatch for ~3 meals every 3 days a hopper mouse (or pinky rat)
-till 200g- every 5 days a small mouse (or rat fuzzy)
-till 350g- every 7 days a rat pup (or freshly weaned mouse) *this is when I personally swap to rats*
-till 500g- every 7 days a weaned rat (or fully grown mouse)

After that, it depends on the sex, and whether or not they are breeding. 14 days might be a little premature, you might be better with 10 at this stage, but you will just have to watch how he does. If he starts to thin out too much, you can go to 10. 14 is a good maintenance diet once they have reached mostly full size, which for a male is about 1000-1200g. Females are a bit trickier, but for pet-only, you can do roughly the same thing but till 2000-2500g.

[Hugsplox]

After that, it depends on the sex, and whether or not they are breeding. 14 days might be a little premature, you might be better with 10 at this stage, but you will just have to watch how he does. If he starts to thin out too much, you can go to 10. 14 is a good maintenance diet once they have reached mostly full size, which for a male is about 1000-1200g. Females are a bit trickier, but for pet-only, you can do roughly the same thing but till 2000-2500g.

Yea I was worried that I might be jumping the gun on this. I might back him down to 10 and just see how he does. The big concern was he got big enough that I thought he'd do alright on smalls, and I mean they're small smalls my rat breeder is fantastic and lets me hand pick what I need. I swapped him over and then started worrying that I was putting too much him too quickly. Like I said, probably overthinking but that's why I ask folks with a metric ton more experience than me lol.

[nikkubus]

Don't stress out too much about it. A lot of the time they will fast all on their own if they are getting too chunky. If they don't, and start getting a bit round, it's easy to correct if you don't just continue to overfeed once you notice it.

Another thing besides the shape of the snake you can watch for (often shows more immediately too) is the waste, but it requires a bit of time getting used to what the baseline should be. I know it's time to back off on feeding a bit with my females during follicle development (they eat really heavy towards the beginning and then need to slow down during the latter part) when I start getting really large and smelly poop from them. When they are eating the correct amount, it's just compact and well digested little turds. When it's too much, they will "blow up" a whole corner of the enclosure with something that looks like it came out of a rottweiler.

[Hugsplox]

When it's too much, they will "blow up" a whole corner of the enclosure with something that looks like it came out of a rottweiler.

When I was feeding him every 7 days with a small he would have these small dog sized turds, 3-4 inches long that really looked like a dog had gotten into the enclosure somehow. It made me laugh but also I was like aaah maybe you're eating too much lol

[EL-Ziggy]

I stopped weighing my snakes and their prey items years ago. I just don’t feed oversized prey items. I use a pretty simple feeding schedule as well but I also like to mix things up a bit in terms of prey type/size and feeding frequency so nothing is really set in stone.

every 5-7 days the 1st year
every 7-14 days the 2nd year
every 2-4 weeks as adults.