I go by what I have available in my rat breeding rack. I actually had some older female rats that I'm soon replacing that ate all their young, died during birth, or only had a few pups. All those are going to be pulled and replaced and eventually fed off to my retic. But I ended up with many rats that were a bit small and actually ran out and couldn't feed a bunch of my male ball pythons. Sometimes I have an excess and will feed multiple rats per snake and with nearly 50 snakes feeding multiple rodents per snake means I can burn through 100-150 rats in a single feeding! Sure clears out my excess inventory LOL.
Mostly though I go by the body condition of the snake. I usually spot a few that are underweight and make a note of them. Then I feed (live) to all my snakes, come back 5 minutes later and see if any are uneaten. If they are not eaten I'll move them over to the snakes that are thin for a second or third meal. If my snakes are overweight I'll skip one or two weeks between feedings.
I also never go over 15% of the body weight of the snake, I've actually had a few snakes go off of food after feeding a rodent that's too big for it. I think it makes them try to size up the rodent next time to try to see if it's too big or not, I'd rather give some confidence to the snake that anything I feed it will be the appropriate size. If I have a thin snake and an excess of rats that are on the small size I've actually fed up to five rats in one feeding, it puts some weight on the snake and uses up my extra rats. It helps to balance out the supply and demand of rats / snakes. Usually I pair up 6 female rats per week with a male rat, but now that I'm running on the low side I've been pairing up 9 female rats per week. About three weeks before my eggs hatch I'll have to pair up even more.
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