Kevin Hit 3.

[CloudtheBoa]

Very nice carpet there Gio! Happy birthday, Kevin! Looks like his any bdays are very close together. XD I was definitely thinking of a carpet before I got River, and if they get a tad bit bigger than boas, then maybe I'll have to consider carpets instead of retics. lmao I like the bigger snakes, but I don't think I could have too many Rivers. I didn't think they got anywhere near as big as has been discussed here, which is part of the reason I didn't get any yet. I thought they stayed about the same size or smaller than boa constrictors with some subspecies or localities sometimes getting up to 8'.

I'm reasonably confident I know the photo you are talking about, it was a friend of Gus R in the photo with his hands on the neck of a huge female boa.

You guys covered male combat and some other stuff so I'm going back to an earlier comment I made about 'big snakes eat big meals'. Gus R. talked about raising many boas to 8 feet on rats, but the ones that he raised to greater lengths required larger prey. It didn't have anything to do with nutrition, maybe something to do with calories but I don't think it was the amount of calories over the period of a year but the amount of calories per meal that did 'something'. A mature female BCO here grew more (length) on just 3 meals of 4+ pound rabbits in a year than the previous two years on rats. I've see similar results with other boa. IMO large meals activate something in their genes triggering growth.

I know my buddy Gio has this thread in Carpets but I know boas so I have to relate those observations and if he doesn't like it on his thread, too bad! Friend .

You always hear Suriname Guyana boa keepers talk about feeding mice the first year, not feeding too often, not feeding too large, etc...and its all true but how is it the largest bc on the planet are such slow starters? And how is it that even a 9-10 foot captive born Suriname/Guyana boa is very rare (let alone something really big)? Something happens to boas as they age and granted genetics are a factor as an individual boa, differences in other subs of boas (when the BCO were young in my care they could eat meals with ease that I wouldn't feed to a much larger non adult Suriname boa) and even location within a sub is a factor (I don't believe a Pokigron Suriname boa will reach the size of some of the Suriname boas brought into the country 35-40 years ago). As a boa matures they are more capable of eating large meals. As keepers most say meal size should be equal to their body width -a good practice for sure but mature boas thrive when going beyond this size guideline and can swallow larger prey with an ease they didn't have when they were younger. A mature 7 foot Pokigron Suriname eats rabbits over 2 pounds with ease but I never would have fed a meal as large (relative to size) when it was a younger snake.

I think males in some boa subs (areas of location) have the potential to reach large sizes but they don't. Import houses get in really big females once in a while but I've never heard of males that compare...why is that? I have a theory. As I said above, large meals trigger growth and as they mature they are capable of eating much larger prey as compared to percentage of body mass than when they were younger. That pertains to sex because the female boa is desperate after giving birth, eating anything she can fit in her pie hole that she crosses paths with and she is spending way more time looking for things to cross her path than a male. This combined with luck and years of being successful lead to a large female snake. Mature males in captivity (and I'd bet are similar in the wild) are about conserving resources (they are lazy). They hunt less and require much less food. Even non breeding females are wanting to be fed more than males in captivity.

Breeders may never noticed the ability for prey size increase in mature boas as it doesn't matter to them and I think other keepers who have observed it don't talk about it because they don't want to influence a keeper into doing something that is outside of their 'range'. I hesitate to post some of this food size 'stuff' because I don't want someone with a limited understanding to kill their boa. It is an absolute fact that increased calorie intake in a young boa will not give you a large, old boa and overfeeding an adult boa will only get you a fat adult...like my buddy Gio quoting Gus...the largest boas are the oldest.

Idk about you, but I feel it's pretty dang obvious a 4 lb rabbit is going to hit the growth spurts harder than a rat that might max out at 3 lbs if you're lucky. Feeding a boa 4 lb rabbit is quite like feeding it 4 jumbo rats a sitting instead of just one large. Of course it's going to have more growth, it's more food! Ime, if you keep the size of rabbits closer to the size of a rat you'd normally feed it...the growth is about the same, although they'll keep more body mass than with rats alone on a conservative schedule. My boas eating large rats start out on 1/2 lb rabbits, very roughly the same size as a large rat. I don't currently have a boa I'd consider feeding a 1 lb rabbit, let alone a 4 lb rabbit. My biggest is only 7', though, so she gets 1/2-3/4 lb rabbits, if she was closer to 8' maybe she'd get those 1 lb rabbits. Obviously, they can take larger, but I learned the hard way with Cloud that as little as 1-2 overly-large rabbits can put on a LOT of excess weight and not necessarily a ton of length growth. You want growth, but you don't want to make them fat, either.

Now it is interesting that more snakes aren't larger of any given species, as they do grow even on "small" amounts of food, and given time they grow no matter how far behind they're put with periods of low food intake. My 2010 male has grown half a foot in the 4 years he's been with me: and that's despite a roughly half year period of lowered food intake due to the overheating incident, and only getting a small rat every 3 weeks. I was not feeding him any more often than his typical 2-3 weeks (3 weeks more often than not nowadays) even when he was getting half-sized rats. Could it just be that there isn't a large population of mature enough individuals to show more of the massive side? Or maybe even genetics, like you say, if most of those are from populations or bloodlines with less size potential. But if food intake affects size I'm definitely interested to see how big my conservatively-fed snakes are in another 5 years, and to see how my more mature snakes continue to grow. Cloud only grows a couple inches every few years atm, and I didn't measure Dominika when I first got her so it'll be a few more years probably before I'll notice any (IF any) growth from her. She has put on at least a pound of weight since the day I got her and that's despite slimming down her girth, so I expect she did grow a few inches since I got her, I just wasn't keeping track.