First, thanks so much for all the responses.
Let me reiterate that I raise and feed my own live mice. I don't do rats for a couple reasons, because I have no idea what I'd do with a 300+g breeder female rat once it was past breeding age (I know my almost 2000 gram snake could take one, but it's not a battle I'd want to put her through). I have also seen rats aggressively attack a snake when offered as feed. It's not something I want to see again. I've never seen anything like that from mice. If you feed rats and that works for you, great, it's just not for me.
The mice I am feeding can be anywhere from 12g to 30g just depending on what my colonies have available. I'm still adjusting colony output to feed this new addition. Because I'm exclusively feeding mice, girth will never be an issue. Now that my smallest snake is above 300g there's no size mouse that will be too big girth wise.
Thanks for answering two of my questions here. I felt like I was getting pretty good growth, but I couldn't find any data online about growth rates to confirm that. It seemed to me that it was about time to try switching to weekly and you've confirmed that. It's gotten kinda annoying to have a snake on a different feeding cycle than weekly. I do wonder how little the breeder must have been feeding this snake for him to have only been 111g at 4 months old.Originally Posted by anicatgirl
This seems like the way to go with the juvenile snakes. I just went and divided up the feedings in my spreadsheet by month and looked at the total amount fed that month divided by 4 to get the weekly average and then compared it to his average weight for that month. Every month falls into the 10-15% fed per week range.
So the only question left is how do you know when to cut back to the slower adult feeding scale? 1yr? 2? At a certain size? Will they just start refusing feedings as their metabolism slows in adulthood, or will they happily eat their way into obesity?
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