Feeding Questions!!!

[Alexandra V]

The weight of your snakes isn't as important as the overall look. If they have a sort of "triangular" shape to them, they're underweight. They should look voluptuous and curvy, if you will.

As for feeding, the rule of thumb is that the prey should be about as big around as your snake at its widest point, or the prey item should weigh 10% - 15% of your snake's weight. I prefer to feed young ones every five days until they get up to about 400g ish.

If your male isn't picky, I don't think he'd have a hard time switching to rats, which I would recommend doing because it's more convenient when your snake gets bigger. Your female would grow faster on rats too because they're a lot meatier.

My advice: try them on a rat about the same size as the mice that they'll eat consistently, and try thawing the rat out in a bag with a mouse or two at the same time, so that it'll smell like mouse for the first couple times.

BTW, I would not mind if the female caught up with the male by offering a bit less than he needed for maximum growth rate but I do not want to do anything that will compromise his health.

Now about this. Your snakes don't need to be the same weight, they all grow differently. I'm not sure I understand... You'd like to bring the male's weight down by feeding less to match the female's?

I don't believe that's a good plan for you or your snake. You're better off to just feed them on a five day schedule with appropriately sized prey and just let them grow at their own weight. Your female should catch up to the male in weight, as females are usually larger than males, so she might have just been a slow starter.

Making a snake lose weight is not really a good idea, especially when they're so young.