Weight

[Malum Argenteum]

I just don’t understand this fascination some folks have with constantly weighing their snakes. How is that information useful? What difference does it make if my snake is 1500g or 1800g as long as it’s healthy? I can understand it if a breeder needs a female to be a certain size before pairing her, but other than that I just don’t get it. Somebody make it make sense please. 😀

Well, I can't speak to the habits of BP keepers specifically, but for other species there's some usefulness.

Snakes that brumate are best weighed before and after to gauge whether humidity and temps were acceptable (weight can be lost through transpiration if air is too dry, and by excess metabolism if temps are too high). Tracking weight of females helps to know whether to skip a year of breeding, or to avoid double clutching in species that sometimes tolerate it.

Keepers with long term breeding projects use both absolute weight and weight gain over time as a factor in evaluating pairings. If I have a clutch that grows much slower than my norm given the same inputs, I might be less likely to repeat that pairing (in some species, speed of growth is something of a virtue, or an indication of overall genetic vigor).

Novice keepers might (try to) use weight comparisons with other people's snakes as a sort of 'sanity check'; this, as mentioned, isn't very useful since growth rates depend on feeding habits, temps, genetics, and so on -- so an X age snake may well be half the weight of another X age snake of the same species and both could be doing just fine. But for a novice keeper -- and any keeper, really -- simply knowing an animal's weight changes over time is one more data point in determining whether the animal is in fact healthy.