I'm just going to leave this here. If you don't care to read all of it, I've quoted what IMO is the most important paragraph from the study.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/1...0.00477.x/full
Our analyses show that contemporaneous levels of food supply influenced growth rates of pythons, but only to about the same degree as levels of food availability earlier in the individual's life. Thus, an animal's body size reflected not only its age, sex and current feeding rate, but was also a function of the nutritional environment that the animal experienced in the past. Importantly, the way that current levels of prey availability influenced current levels of growth was itself modified by the animal's early growth history. The end result is that the variation in growth rates that was engendered among cohorts of yearling pythons persisted throughout the life of the snakes. We do not know the mechanism by which this ‘silver spoon’ effect occurs, but our data show that the rate at which a python grows is determined not only by its current feeding rate, but also by the nutritional environment that it encountered in its first year of life.
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