I have a 3mo ball python that I recently bought, and to save money, I purchased bulk small mice from Rodentpro that were on sale (woot woot!) Ive just fed a mouse to the snake, and am realizing i probably should have gone with bigger prey. Of course, I know there is nothing wrong with small prey, but I wonder, should I feed more frequently with slightly smaller prey? Offer two meals on feed day? I plan to feed every 7 days.
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If the two mice leave a large belly bulge, I would be a bit cautious. You can risk a regurge that way.
Otherwise just burning through this batch at 7 day feedings should be fine. If they seem particularly hungry, maybe give them an extra as a ‘treat’ every now and then.
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Without knowing the size of the snake or the size of the mouse, it is hard to say what size or the frequency to choose.
With that said, if you know for sure the food is too small, you can feed every 5 days. This would be better than two every meal.
There are 2 common ways to judge the food size,
1 the most common is to have the food be around the same size as the snakes thickest part.
2 is to go by weight, most say 10% of the snakes weight. A small number of people might say 8%.
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I go by the weight of my snake and use the 10-15% weight rule for rodents.
So if my snake weighed 250 grams, my prey size would be 25g - 37g
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We have a baby ball also. I weighed him yesterday at 133g I am also feeding small mice. They are between 9 and 11 g. He is getting 1 every 6-8 days. We have had him about 6 weeks. The pet store my daughter got him at still had him on fuzzies. We didn’t want to stress him with the change right away so we did 2 fuzzies for the first 3 weeks and then sized up. He’s growing quickly and is about to shed. I have 3 smalls left and I will probably go to regular adult mice after that. If you can keep an eye in his weight, size, and speed of digestion those are the best indicators. Its taking ours 5-7 days from feed to poop. Our Maui was underweight when we got him. Only 110g at about 2.5-3 months old.
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One thing to remember is that in the wild snakes are opportunist feeders. They don’t always eat the exact prey proportionate to their body weight. They make do with what they can get. Even though this proportionate feeding can be accomplished very easily with captive bred/kept animals, it will not hurt the animal to be fed smaller sized meals at times or a tad larger meals at times……
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Thanks everyone for your responses. Upon weighing both the snake and prey, I was surprised to find the ratio at exactly 10 percent! Lucky me.
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