she is a wierd snake!

[ZinniaZ]

We decided that our snake Paradox may be a little on the light side, so we have upped her feeding to every five days for a little while. Today was the first feeding on the new schedule. She is such a wierdo. I don't know if she wasn't completely hungry or what, but we put the mouse in-- live, because she is on and off of the frozen ones. She went all around and over and about that mouse. The mouse totally sat still and didn't move while she swirled around him and looked at him and sniffed him. Finally, she just decided to eat him without killing him and put her whole mouth over his neck while he was still alive. The mouse didn't even move. She stayed like that for a while and then FINALLY very slowly wound around him and killed him. Afterwards, she went over him really carefully again checking him out from every angle and THEN she ate him.

I'm not sure if this was because a) she doesn't really like white mice a whole lot, b) the mouse didn't move around and act like prey, or c) she was not extremely hungry.

Regardless, the mouse is now gone and she is in her hide sleeping it off.

[soy.lor.n]

does she strike the frozen mice?
I know snakes do that to frozen sometimes (just put the head right in the mouth and start swallowing) so she might have thought it was already dead if it was being as still as you say

[ZinniaZ]

She does strike the frozen mice. But maybe she did think it was already dead. It was certainly a quiet mouse. All we saw it do was blink it's eyes.

[nevohraalnavnoj]

I don't remember where, but I've read about BP's eating live (without striking and constricting) a prey item that they think is really small. They just start in and swallow it down. Maybe see if the BP does it again?

JonV

[Schlyne]

I had a gopher snake eat two mouse fuzzies live once. It was the end of the show and somebody had left them behind, so I took them home to be feed off (they would have died otherwise). They were apparently small enough that she didn't feel the need to constrict them at all. She just opened up and started swallowing them. I was horrified.

[Whittney32]

thats crazy!