Quote Originally Posted by ajmreptiles View Post
When the female is at a healthy weight and starts to build follicles, it will trigger more of a food response as she is wants to build some fat reserves to sustain herself through the breeding season. In the wild, when they are close to ovulation they probably don't eat until the eggs they have been incubating hatch.

back when breeders like Brian, Kevin, and the other pioneering BP breeders were starting out, there really wasn't that wealth of knowledge on breeding these animals in captivity that there is today, so they were figuring a lot of this out as they were going a long based on what they knew of breeding other python species
So if I understand correctly, you want to keep your female at a healthy weight (not too large or small) so that you can feed her consistently around breeding season, as giving her food triggers follicular growth. So perhaps the breeders in the video were not feeding their females as much because they didn't need the food as often because they were already so large or the snakes were refusing because of already being overweight.