Feeding Adult BPs

[phenyx]

I was at my favorite cricket supplier today and I got to talking with one of the guys who worked there. He mentioned feeding his adult female BP 1 medium rat every seven days.

That's too often, yes? He seemed to think his snake was better getting fed more often. I mean, I guess feeding once a week is ok, but you'd have to go to a smaller prey size right?

He also showed me a demonstration of her girth as a circle with his fingers that looked like it was 4 inches across. I know BPs are chunky buggers but that seemed extreme.

If a snake gets obese, would that make it hard to tell whether or not the prey produces a noticeable bulge in the snakes girth?

[riddick07]

It’s hard to tell without seeing the animal but it sounds like a decent amount of food. I feed a medium every 2-3 weeks for my adult female BP and my subadult Female BP is closer to every 2 weeks. The subadult is easily gaining size on this schedule and my adult maintains fine. My adult female is over 2000grams.

[TRD]

adults feed every 3-5 weeks depending on the animal and prey size... a medium rat every 7 days leads to obesity with these snakes very easily. Should really take care of fat contents as well in the feeder animals. Leaving a 'bulge' is generally only there for juveniles. There are a lot of adult snakes where there's no bulge at all because they are pretty girthy to start with...

[craigafrechette]

That's a lot of food for a BP. I'm guessing he has an unhealthy, overweight BP. But, without more info on the animal it's difficult to say.

As for the lump, that is primarily a guideline for juveniles through sub-adults. Adult females can be fed medium rats every 2-4 weeks.

[IDvsEGO]

sounds like a lot to me but I am not an expert by any means at all. only had my bp for a few months.

[Tsubaki]

That's a lot of food for an ballpython yeah, if his bps birth is actually round its definetly overweight.

[Aaron_S]

I dislike using simple terms like "medium" for describing prey size. Reason being each place has it's own definition of what constitutes a certain size. Recently I've been seeing rodent ads for "small mediums" and "large mediums". So it definitely can vary.

Also it's possible he has a large ball python. Many years ago there were large imports of females from the "volta" area in Africa. (I believe it was Volta but could be wrong on the name). This is was due to the fact the animals grew to larger sizes and thus would give more eggs. Essentially people found a locale ball python like in other species of snakes. These females would grow to be 4,000+ grams with ease on the same diet as other ball pythons. So for a snake this size, if it's not obese then a medium rat (In and around 150 grams) would be fine.

My females get a rat in the 150 gram range once a week. Mine are also breeders. I'll do something in a few days as it's feeding day tonight and I won't be taking pictures at this time. I'll take a picture of one of my females who hasn't laid this year, didn't lay last year and her size on this feeding regime for you.