Quote Originally Posted by MasonC2K View Post
The closest to a "scientific" approach was one done by Brian from BHB last year.
He did, and the results were VERY interesting, but they were conducted with corn snakes, not ball pythons.

One of the interesting results was that the hatchlings showed a very slight increase in growth rate when their prey was dusted with vitamin powder--the experiment should definitely be repeated many times, in order to determine if that was just an anomaly. (Actually, to really come to any conclusion at all, it will have to be repeated a number of times, you can't really draw any conclusions from one simple trial like this).

Animals fed one slightly larger than normal prey item every 7 days (I believe that was the time frame) showed dramatic growth compared with the animals fed several smaller items more frequently.

If this DOES translate over to ball pythons, it may mean that some of the commonly repeated advice is actually wrong. It may be better to feed a big prey item once a week, and not feed small ones more often...at least, if you want fast growth.

To extrapolate this, the idea that feeding a small rat once a week is better than feeding a large rat once every two weeks may turn out not to be ideal after all. This is definitely worth exploring.

Just keep in mind--a corn snake is not a ball python is not a boa constrictor. They may all have different ideal feeding schedules and requirements.

I think it's something that all of us breeders should be doing more often. Controlled feeding trials will tell us a lot more than guessing or intuition, and fairly often, it does seem as though that's what folks are going by!