Kevin Hit 3.

[bns]

I would not inherently guess feeding a snake the same amount of food it'd eat in 3 months for one feeding to equate to a certain amount of growth. Surely, if you were to feed a snake a 4 lb rabbit every 3 months (assuming your snake would eat that much in that short a time frame), the snake would use just what it needed at the time and store the rest as fat? Fat, especially in snakes, takes a LOT of time to burn and convert to energy, so by the time it gets its next 4 lb meal it has yet to use any of that stored fat...I *personally* would assume a snake to utilize the calories from a 4 lb rabbit every 3 months differently than it would utilize 4 lbs of rabbit spread over 3 meals in a 3 month span. But that's what I would have assumed.

Excess is stored as fat. The difference in how that store is used is what I'm talking about. Large infrequent meals with seasonal fasting triggers stores to be used as growth vs many small meals that are more likely to be stored as fat and not used towards growth. (-This depends on age, seasonality etc -covered that earlier...)

I guess you can't see my signature if you're using mobile. :/ Cloud is my 2011 BI. Back before I joined this forum, he was fed every week, year round, and even as much as 5 days the first year. I would see 1"-3" of growth every single week. But that growth only went on for so long before the frequent (and sometimes large) meals stopped resulting in so much rapid growth. Even before I started implementing his current seasonal, conservative schedule, his growth hit a rapid plateau. And yes, he was definitely fat during that time until this forum set me straight and I drastically changed his feeding. I was feeding him at this heightened pace for about the first 2.5 years of his life, so technically between his abnormally large size for his age at the time, and being past the minimum 18 month maturity for a male, I was pushing food into him past maturity. So, you do bring up a good point, and I wonder how that growth would have been impacted had I kept on with the large meals and fed seasonally. Would he still have hit a plateau?

Yes, he would have hit a plateau but it would have occurred years later.

My intuition would say yes, but that may not necessarily reflect reality - regardless I am very hesitant to attempt it with any of my snakes, pythons, boas, or otherwise. Nowadays, he's 6'8" and he eats maybe 9 meals a year. Meaning, if he got a 1/2 lb rabbit every single meal that's only 4.5 lbs for the entire year. But realistically, he gets less than that, as most of his meals are rats below 300 grams to avoid fatty prey items. I only use the rabbits to help pad him over his winter fast and get him started after I end it.

Sounds about right to me.

(Edit to add: yes, she is fed seasonally as well: though I am feeding her year round this year as I attempted to breed her, and I'll want her eating after she gives birth - if she does.)

Why the change?