:shock: Well,
I fed my Apok and Oracle their first rats and it was indeed eyeopening - This was their first feeding on live rats so I first scented the rats by holding them with the adult mice that were slated to be fed to Cypher and Trinity ( Trinity seems to have not recognized that rats are a prey item yet, she will totally ignore them ) and then introduced them to my big male and female in their respective feeding boxes. The reaction was immediate and frightening. Both Ball Pythons seized their rats and immediately began constricting. The rats screamed and struggled futilely for about 30 seconds before succumbing to the steel hard loops of the Ball
Pythons.

I watched carefully to see that they were able to ingest the much larger rats with no problem and have continued to monitor my BPs to make sure that there has been no regurgitation problems. So far so good. I now have to see if I can tempt Trinity into accepting a rat - she IS big enough but her search picture/scent recognition is geared for large adult mice. She has not put one and one together and come up with "RAT" as far as her prey targeting goes. Well, snakes are NOT mental giants I would suppose... :wink: Cypher is still kind of a small guy and I really dont think he is gonna be a real big Ball Python anyhow...he might stay on adult mice for good.

EyeLashViper