In Between Rodent Sizes

[Patricia]

Folks, I'm looking for advice on food size.

Our snake is now around 230g. 10%-15% of our snake's weight = 23g-35g. I buy f/t mice from local Petsmart/Petco, but we now seem to be in an in-between size from what they offer. Their adult mice are 20g and their small rats are 40g. That's a big jump!

I'm about to feed it a 20g mouse, but that's getting too small. What should I do instead? Should I try feeding 2 medium mice? They're around 14g-18g.

I notice that buying in bulk online offers a lot of different sizes, but we have only our one little BP, so I'm hesitant to buy 25 of one size as he'll outgrow it before going through it all.

[seeya205]

Is there any other places in your area that sells them? I would go with a rat pup if you can find them. You can feed multiple prey items but its less stressful on the snake to feed one. You can ask Petco for their smallest rat and try it and see if it will eat it.

[teebyrd393]

I dont worry so much about the grams of the prey item as I do the visual size. The ratpup/ mouse should be as big around as the widest circumference of your little guy...no bigger. I'm to the point where I'm making a c shape with my thumb and pointer and sliding a medium rat through it, just to make sure :-)

[seeya205]

I dont worry so much about the grams of the prey item as I do the visual size. The ratpup/ mouse should be as big around as the widest circumference of your little guy...no bigger. I'm to the point where I'm making a c shape with my thumb and pointer and sliding a medium rat through it, just to make sure :-)

Great advice!

[OldHippie]

I cannot say enough good things about TheMouseFactory.com. Most recently, I realized I needed to upsize, and the packaging meant they were going to send me 50 mice - which would almost certainly go bad before my one BP would eat them all. So the lady at TMF suggested I go to baby rats, since economically it would make sense to go to rats at some point soon anyway. She warned me that some BPs don't easily make the transition to rats, but that they would work with me if it didn't go well.

I went to small rats and, after a short learning curve (more mine than his), he eats them like [insert your favorite snack food here]. As I've said in another thread, what seemed to be the most important thing was to make sure I was warming the food well enough - which I do by microwaving a bowl of water (without the rat!) rather than just using hot tap water. I immerse the rat (in a Ziplock bag) in the water for twenty or thirty minutes, until an infrared thermometer (which I bought for about nine bucks on eBay) shows that the food (removed from the water) is at "food temperature".

By the time I'm done with this batch, I think he'll be ready for the next size of rat - he's mostly gaining girth rather than length. But there's a lot of 'up' from here in rats, whereas I was within sight of maxing out the size of mice.

For what it's worth....