I breed ASFs and mice and rats, the ASFs produce SLOW!!! I actually accidently fed off all my males, luckily I had a female that had babies and at least one is a male, so I'm waiting for him to grow up to breed back. But the babies grow painfully slow, and they have a problem raising up their babies, seems like a lot of the babies end up dying. My rats and mice produce 10 times faster than the ASF. I almost got rid of them but since they are very difficult to come by I decided to keep one tub of ASF in my rack just to keep them around.
It seems to me that the size of the prey item is more important than what type of rodent it actually is. Usually I switch back and forth between mice, ASF, and rats. Most times when a snake doesn't eat it's because I offered something too big, I think that's why a lot of snakes like the mice, they are a good size for just about any ball python, big or small. This week I was having a problem with my rodents stinking up the basement and I realized it's because I have too many male mice in the tubs, so I fed off a bunch of males tonight (my smell almost totally went away!).
Even if I give an adult snake a mouse he only gets one. I feed twice a week, sometimes they get an adult mouse, sometimes a small / medium / large rat, and sometimes an ASF of various size depending on which tubs are full of rodents that week. I have 20 rodent tubs and 20 snakes and it works out just perfect. If I have too many rodents I double up or triple up, especially the mice or small rats. I do have snakes that randomly won't eat for a couple weeks, but I still offer whatever is available twice a week, not really concerned if they don't eat unless they start looking really skinny.
I feed only fresh killed rodents, the only live ones I'll feed are the newborn hairless pinky mice to my AZ MT King snakes. That's actually the only reason I keep the mice around, the newborn baby rats are too big for my King snakes LOL.
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