Just not sure on weight

[M0xie]

Hi there,
I'm a little concerned about my yellow belly spider BP and as it is my first reptile I'm still learning the ropes on being a reptile mom.

I have done all my research and such but I'm just not sure on his weight. He is currently 13 months old and weights around 360 -370 grams or 0.7 -0.8 lbs. He doesn't seem to be underweight as I cant see his spine tapering other than when he is wrapping around my hand and even then its still not much. There is no stretchy skin or con-caving belly either. After doing re-search I'm still not sure if he is ok. Most of what I have seen says he should be almost 600 grams. He is about an 1-1.5" around.

I just wanted to see what everyone else thought as there are people on here with WAY more experience then me. Any tips or info would be much appreciated. Thank you!

[pretends2bnormal]

Their weights vary a lot. Some are slower growers, some have smaller than average adult sizes, etc.

It also highly depends how much and how often he is/was fed from hatching. Being fed exactly 10% of his weight every week would result in a bigger snake at that age than one that fed every 2 weeks. Or one who was a problematic feeder at one point or even consistently.

As long as he is a healthy body condition, then he is fine. The following chart is the guide most of us here feed, although I choose to move my males to every 2 weeks on small rats once they're eating small rats AND over 1 year old.



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[M0xie]

Thank you so much! any tips for moving to rats cuz my guy is a very picky eater. right now he is being fed a 20-30 gram FT mouse once a week (commercial distributes in my area arnt very cosistent on size) i would love to get him onto rats so that im not gonna have to feed multiple mice.

[pretends2bnormal]

Scenting is the simplest method besides just trying one (but I assume since you say he is picky that you've tried to just feed a rat as-is before). Rub the rat on the mouse or thaw one of each together in a baggie so the mouse smell rubs off on the rat then offer it after heating. Blow drier works better than hot/warm water to heat it up to life-like temperatures for this since it doesn't wash the smell away.

If round 1 or 2 fails, you can try slower and feed a rat-scented mouse a few times to get the smell more familiar and then feed the mouse-scented rat.

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[M0xie]

I went to the vet a few months ago and they said he looked amazing and he did need to gain a little weight. After getting some chunky mice (cuz he still wont touch rats and i made a 'mice....rub' so just gonna wait a little longer and do some more research.) he has reached 455 grams at last weigh in.