This is not power feeding as I’ve ever understood it. You’re right that the practice of power feeding as it is actually defined in this hobby has been shown to have negative effects, and I would question anyone who is doing it to their animals.
In this case I’ll suspend my judgement until someone can show that this proposed feeding schedule is actually harmful. In the meantime, I’ll keep to my once every 5 days feeding schedule for hatchlings because I don’t have the means to significantly add to the data.
Agree or disagree, I like hearing as many perspectives and experiences as possible. Many of the replies here are only going to discourage experienced people from sharing things. I don’t know about you, but I’d love to know as much as possible - the good and the bad. From there I can ponder, perhaps experiment, form my own opinions, and then maybe someday share my own experiences on a topic.
Remember that this whole hobby is founded on experimentation and sharing the learnings of doing so.
So this was an interesting thread to say the least. Many things it seems people are missing here. This feeding schedule whether you support or not is NOT I repeat NOT power feeding which is feeding more frequent and larger meals. This is breaking down a 1 100g meal to 5 20g meals therefore “smaller meals”! It’s still the same exact food intake that will be way easier to digest and far more beneficial. Of which those smaller prey would be far healthier an with a far less fat content. So long as you get your rodents from a respectable breeder who doesn’t feed dog food or some other garbage food to his/her rodents what does it matter? I bet you could even go down to a 10-15g meal a day verses one 100g every 5 days and still be beneficial.
Snakes only retain on average 33% of their food intake. Smaller meals that number jumps up and larger meals it plummets. Let’s also not forget Balls for example would never come across 100g meals much less the 200g+ meals some large adults can take/are offered. There is not rodents that size running around Africa for them to eat! Yet it’s the norm to feed small-med rats to adult balls with some excepting a large rat in the hobby. With that logic we all “power feed”!
Honestly I can pretty much guarantee that if some scientific evidence was out there on this over a long term multi snake and species experiment the results would show how much healthier it is for the snake and far more accurate to natural wild feeding behaviors. Snakes don’t only go out and find the “safest/largest” prey item every specific feeding date. No they eat what is available when it is available. If it comes across a rodent nest it’s going to eat all the babies.
Honestly though if your looking for a safe option to get a better growth rate especially from hatchlings you should consider Perforation of your prey items. There is a study showing how cutting the prey to expose the insides as it’s a known fact skin is hard to digest leads to higher growth rates as the prey item is easier to digest and retained better. The study was conducted on Corns.
Lastly I’ll add that it is wrong of anyone to assume if someone cares about their animals or not. Brian B. is one of the most hated people in the industry for many reason and many of those are legit reasons, but even he is still passionate about reptiles. Making money doing what you love is not wrong. If I loved to save lives, work with my hands or travel would it be wrong of me to make money as a doctor, mechanic or pilot? To much hate in the hobby/industry I swear!
They don’t really put on much fat because daily feeding only occurs for a very short period of time relative to the life of the snake and during this time they are not fed MORE food they are feed at more frequent intervals. It is VERY likely that in the wild these ambush predators might come across a very plentiful area and they are programmed to take advantage of those situations. In the wild they would gorge themselves or feed daily whichever opportunity presented itself. It is far more unlikely that feeding would occur on a set schedule such as weekly feedings. Very little fat stores are developed during times of rapid growth. The corresponding increase in metabolism seems to use the energy for growth instead of storing it as fat. If this feeding regimen was continued for more than just a few months or over the lifetime of the snake I am sure we would see something like you describe but I have never tried that.
The animals in my facility are likely fed more closely to a wild scenario. Once a male has reached maturity they are fed about every 2 weeks. Sometimes they take off for months at a time during their normal fast periods and during the breeding season. I want the males to be like athletes.
Your post shows a lack of intellectual curiosity and a lack of basic biological understanding that is very sad to me. I hope you will someday gain the desire to learn more about the animals in your care and help the community push forward in our collective knowledge.
Exactly. You are feeding the exact same amount of calories just on a different schedule in the beginning to keep the metabolism higher and growth rate faster. Most people understand the concept. We just have a few people on here that have not grasped the concept.
Thank you. I have learned a lot over the years by simply experimenting. We try things and develop better techniques through trial and error. It’s how science is done.
Nick just doesn’t seem to understand basic biology. If you take a 100 gram meal fed weekly and divide it into 5 - 20 grams meals fed daily. We are not feeding the animal any more here. We are feeding the exact same amount at more frequent intervals. This seems so basic. I have to believe our good buddy Nick is either purposely misrepresenting the concept or being purposely obtuse.
Wait…I bet Nick isn’t real. He is a Russian bot just trying to influence the election. lol.
I make no apologies for being financially successful breeding reptiles. I am honest. Money is a motivator. Nick is dishonest. If he was honestly not motivated by money he would be selling for far less than me. In fact he would just be concerned about giving them good home and not charge anything for his babies or only charge enough to recoup his costs. He is not doing this for the love of the animals. He is motivated by money. Nick is just dishonest about it because he thinks it sounds good. It’s called Virtue Signaling.
You wont find many breeders with large operations sharing insights like @mikewilbanks did here. It’s no wonder; there’s a host of people that will use the opportunity to criticize or grandstand. Honest debate is important, however, degradation of character based on an opinion displays a low level of professionalism and insight. Whether you agree or disagree with a given topic, let’s keep it classy. Learn, contribute, and teach…but let’s not allow this forum to turn into facebook.
It’s possible this method is better than the once a week plan most use. It seems logical to me that for at least a short period of time this method may even be a healthier feeding regimen than the accepted norm in the hobby. Less bone, less skin, less fur, and less fat has to require less energy to metabolize. Assuming nutritional values are met, this has to lead to less strain on the digestive system. It’s possible this could actually improve the absorption of critical vitamins, minerals, proteins, etc.
I can’t imagine a specific correlation in rapid growth through adolescence and late life health problems in animals with such an efficient metabolisms. Most of nature’s designs grow quickly through their adolescent stages, it increases survival rates. I’ve not seen any studies on the average growth rate of adolescent or juvenile ball pythons in the wild, for people to be so sure this a negative tactic.
I’ve produced and processed thousands of quail, chickens, partridges, and to a lesser degree, large livestock. I’ve seen a lot of organs, and their successes and failures. Fatty tissue buildup and organ failure are typical in diets too rich or too poor in specific nutrition values in most cases. Organs typically build excess fat from consumption of overly fatty foods, or over consumption of fat in general. Outside of that most of the rest of organ failures are caused by either inadequate or excessive consumption of vitamins, minerals, or proteins.
I don’t see how this regiment would lead to an increase in mineral content, fat content, or protein values. I suppose there is an outside chance that this diet could lack a sufficient amount of calcium for specific animals that metabolize it poorly but that’s hard believe.
I guess it’s probably easier to buy into the feeding once a week with the lights off while standing one leg voodoo that the internet is so sure of.
I, for one, appreciate the insight and information posted here by Wilbanks. It’s clearly not a “hey hobbyists, you should all do it this way!” message, from my own perception. But, like they say, make it idiot proof, they’ll just make a better idiot.
Feeding habits must be extremely different in captivity than what we think the wild is like. The old standard of one prey item a week has held for ages with us when applied to quite a number of common species. But a simple video I watched, posted of a wild bird’s nest being raided by a black rat snake, initially sparked my interest in what things really are like in the wild. In the video, the snake consumed the entire clutch of eggs. Liken that to feeding your pet 5 items in one sitting. Not something most of us do as part of standard practice.
Opportunistic animals in the wild run on opportunity. Short of us sticking a GoPro on a few hundred snakes and setting them free, their feeding frequencies will still remain somewhat secretive.
It is not upon us to dictate what a healthy frequency is supposed to be in captivity, only that we provide the nutrition that yields a happy, healthy animal.
That a snake willingly eats a small prey item every single day for a captive keeper, shows what these animals are capable of. If it were force feeding, I would certainly rip into someone for it.
Again, nobody has to follow suit with this type of regimen, and I personally won’t, every day, but I can certainly learn from this as I often felt much is lost when snakes digest fur and bones, but smaller prey certainly needs at least some higher frequency to achieve nutritional demands of a growing animal.
can you link some of your sources, please I’m tryna gather reliable research for both sides & draw an informed conclusion on the functionalities in ball python metabolisms.
Wow do I have issues with this thread. Let’s go through them.
Since numerous people have brought it up, power feeding is overfeeding an animal, enticing oversized meals, piggybacking meals, or force feeding without necessity. Mike’s model isn’t any of these; it is taking the same amount of meal and feeding it incrementally.
Now Nick, posting a study and trying to use it as evidence to back up your position, without citing specifically what evidence is backing up your position. That is such a facebook thing to do. Well this isn’t facebook, quote the paper to make your point. If your response is something a long the lines of “I shouldn’t have to spoon feed it to you” (pun not intended) or “do your research”, again this isn’t facebook and you’ve already shown your goal is to win an internet argument and has nothing to do with a civil discussion for the betterment of these animals. Notice even the study you linked, cites its references with page numbers.
So later on you give a little insight to your point.
So a significant amount of the meal is used during digestion. There is no increase in overall meal with Mikes method, so I fail to see how that in particular is relevant. Also where does it say increasing the organ function by 40x? I see metabolic rate increases 44x if thats where you pulled that from, but that is directly related to the energy comment. That doesn’t mean every organ is functioning 40x more. So feel free to teach me something here, but I think you are misrepresenting data.
The far stretch is that, at best, you are stating that your assumptions and correlations are “the case.” At worst, it is a malicious and purposely mislead attack.
Also some things I found interesting
Mike is reporting he has done this without changing any of the factors they mention. I’d also like to know how they got a snake to eat 100% of its weight… but anyways.
They don’t discuss it, but their graphs of wet mass for the organs don’t come back to their fasting values even after 15 days, besides the heart which seems to around day 13-14. We generally feed our snakes every 5-7 days by most feeding models. They fed 25% of the mass of the snake, most feeding models feed 5-15%.
While I think all of that is worth having a civil discussion about, I think most would agree it is very apples to oranges and you are drawing correlations that are most likely not causation. This data is hard to apply to a more standard feeding model and draw conclusions from, let alone use it to attack mikes model. I mean seriously, the standard feeding model increases feeding frequency well before fasting values return and feeds smaller meals. The EXACT same thing can be said about Mike’s model compared to the standard feeding model, only at an even higher frequency than that.
I have no problem discussing the above, I however never want to see the below again, you took your conclusion from above and responded like this:
Those are quite the accusations, and I’ve already spent enough time on this so I won’t go through each one individually. Not only is this off topic, it has no basis here, its unprovoked and toxic to the forum. Grow up and keep your personal vendetta between you and mike, this is a place for civil discussion. Just because its unconventional doesn’t make it wrong (or right), and just because you have a personal problem doesn’t mean you spew it all over. Again this isn’t Facebook. Handle your business.
This thread certainly should not turn into a praising or bashing storm of M. Wilbanks.
I do have my personal opinion about his business but this does not belong here.
It is an interesting topic that hatchlings up to 500 should benefit from daily but smal feedings. I don’t have the veterinarien backround to know if this feeding regime would be harmful or not.
From common sense though I would think that it can not be beneficial to keep any digestion related organ at pace for 6-9 months without any resting periods.
this is a very interesting topic, Its great to see some people sharing their years of knowledge working with large numbers of animals. It also seems there are others who think the way they do things is thge only way to do it and if someone does things differently than them they are simply wrong. I for one look forward to more post like this from people like Wilbanks.
The sources I read have already been discussed in this thread, which is one that I have learned a lot by participating in. I am in the same boat as you trying to learn more.
I’m tryna gather reliable research for both sides & draw an informed conclusion on the functionalities in ball python metabolisms.