Hi,

My ,

I am guilty of switching food items occasionally - mainly because I have a few that seem kind of fussy (might be related to the fact I only feed F/T ) and if they start turning their nose up at rats I can often tempt them with mice or chicks.

My big female adores chicks and would eat them till the cows came home so for a while she got a rat and a chick every week.
This was more to use up the bag of 50 chicks I had to buy from the shop as they refused to split the bag.

My male got really fussy during breeding time - which has been the last 9 months.

Currently he ignores rats but will lunge for mice as though he had never seen food in his life - a couple of months ago he wasn't keen on mice either but ate chicks with relish and would take the occasional rat. My personal theory on this is he does it to annoy me.

The only things I noticed (and which may be completely false or for reasons I am not aware of);

When eating chicks I thought I saw a colour change with the blushing on their backs becoming much more gold/ bronze looking.

As I was always feeding chicks +plus something else rather than chicks alone I didn't really have any problems with their poop getting horribly smelly either.

However I am not convinced a diet of chicks is all that healthy so would never really recommend it and stopped once the bag of chicks I had ran out. If I ever have to buy more I will try and document any colour changes rather than having to rely on my memory.

So, to recap, I use changes in prey mainly to stimulate fussy feeders mainly and if the animal is eating regularly then I tend to keep to the routine. There is one major exception to this though brought on by neccesity.

Smaller rats are quite hard to get a regular local supply of as well so all my snakes tend to get started on mice then changed to rats once they are eating a more available size - tonight was my lesser and small females first rats for example.

The lesser is 255g and the female 633g.

She will happily eat multiples so has been getting a couple of mice whereas he will apparently only eat one meal per sitting which is why the disparity.

If, for some reason, the smaller size of rats aren't available then I will switch back to mice if possible.

I would have thought live feeders have a very good advantage over us F/T'ers here in that they can gutload their snakes prey to boost the range of vitamins, minerals, colours enhancing compounds etc if they are of a scientific or curious bent.

That might make an intresting experiment for someone.

So, while the range of different prey I tried was small, I only really noticed small superficial colour changes which could have been caused by something else.

The health of the snakes did not seem changed to me but the time was short. Whether someone would risk the health of the snake out of curiosity about long term effects of one specific food source I don't know.

This has turned a bit rambley so I will stop now.


dr del