Food Size versus Rate of Growth in colubrids

[jwsporty]

Now this topic has been brought up before, but I thought I would throw this out into the ring for discussion.

Here's some background..many feel that feeding big is the way to go. Others feel that feeding the "appropriate food size" is the way to go.

Here is what I have discovered over the past 6 months. bearing in mind that the growth rate of every snake is different and other factors may play on the growth development of the animal. (genetics, heating, etc)

The informal experiment:

Two california kingsnakes, same starting size and weight

One california kingsnake was fed one adult mouse once every 7 days, the other was fed 2-3 mouse hoppers every 6 days. Both are approximately the same age, on the same heating regime, 85 degrees, both are in the same type of housing. Both receive regular weekly handlings. So after everything is said and done, the one that was fed "big" is actually growing slower then the one fed smaller items.

Other observations:

Hypo-Brooksi Florida King, female, has put on 130 grams in body weight since measured last december. The funny thing is she will only eat mouse hoppers, larger food items simply scare her and no more then two at a sitting. She defecates regularly, and eats regularly never missing a meal except when she is in shed, which is standard every 4 weeks.

Now I am not saying there is a be all "right" way or an absolute wrong way to feed as long as the animal is getting its nutrition. And this thread is not about the mice vs. rats nutritional issue. All animals talked about so far were fed mice only. Almost all of my adult kings are easily eating rats.

Now its known that if you want your boid to grow fast...feed em big and feed em rats. But is it necessary for animals like ratsnakes, kingsnakes, milksnakes, corn snakes? Personally, I don't think so.

Lately, I have been mixing up the feed frequencies and feed volumes on some of the collection (not the breeders) to see if there is any marked difference in growth. Taking into consideration the fact that in the wild, the snake is not necessarily gonna get what it wants when it wants and that it is not gonna eat precisely every 7 days.

This study was not to determine is you can feed less and get more. I would never put an animal at risk by starving them. It is about the more efficent use of food in the animals.

Let's hear from the old timers and the newbies alike.

And to all newbies.....welcome to the site, live, learn and enjoy!!!

Cheers
Jim

[BoidKeeper]

I personally have found smaller meals more often has been more effective for my snakes. I feed my corns 1 food item equal to girth every five days up to their first year. Or when conditioning for breeding.
Cheers,
Trevor

[Tim_Cranwill]

Originally posted by jwsporty

Now its known that if you want your boid to grow fast...feed em big and feed em rats. But is it necessary for animals like ratsnakes, kingsnakes, milksnakes, corn snakes? Personally, I don't think so.

But why not? Why feed them less nutritious food?

It's possible to have a healthy 400g cornsnake by it's first birthday. I've seen it myself. Is it "better"? Who knows? It's a healthy animal with an <b>appetite</b>.

In your example with the cal kings, which one was being fed more food? If you are just basing it on the number of food items and the apparent size, you might be wrong. Maybe the two-three smaller items would add up to more food if you weighed them... ???

I agree with a lot of what you're saying/hypothesizing especially the part about feeding size and frequency in the wild.

Here's what I look for when feeding:

- <b>Age</b>: Younger snakes get fed more often with "regular" sized food items (1x - 1.5x). Anywhere from 3-5 days with 1-2 meals/feeding….depends if I have leftovers and if they are still roaming.

- <b>Sex</b>: Females about to breed/lay get fed more often with "1.5x +/-" food items. Adult males get offered when I have leftovers or when I notice it's been 7-10 days or so since their last meal... I don’t worry too much about them in the breeding season though. It’s likely they won’t eat anyway.

- <b>Time of year</b>: Feed more often during breeding season and after laying eggs and more just before brumation and after brumation. “Regular” amounts when they are just living normal lives.

All of that is pretty loose. I don’t think ahead to which days I will feed this week. If I have time to feed one night, I look at who “might” eat, who “should” eat and who I “want” to eat (the want part refers to ball pythons :rolleyes: ). Then I thaw what I should need and rarely have leftovers. If I DO have leftovers, I go down the line and see who takes it. That is where I notice the extra growth… when snakes get offered and eat “extra” food.

And of course this all depends on the species. :p


Good post Jim… hopefully it takes off like the shipping charge thread. :)

Here are more of my thoughts on the subject. They are aimed and new keepers but they touch on what I feel are good guidelines...

How Often Should I Feed My Snake? (http://www3.mb.sympatico.ca/~cranwill/faq10.html)

How Large Should My Snake's Food Be?
(http://www3.mb.sympatico.ca/~cranwill/faq9.html)

[Stockwell]

Herpers these days are all so regimented in their beliefs and practices.... Sometimes it amazes me

This is my take.. Snakes in the wild feed infrequently, and they certainly don't carry calendars with them. Sometimes they'll take huge meals, sometimes they'll find a nest of pinkies. Sometimes they'll eat something too big, then barf it up... Then go weeks with nothing... As messed up as this sounds, thats how it has been for snakes for eons.
Another notion that might seem odd to some, is that I feed mature adults based on how they look, and everything doesn't get fed all at the same time...
that would be too much work, because I have a lot of charges.
Generally, I feed females more than males especially when I'm trying to breed them, but if any snakes start looking too heavy in
the back end, and cannot pull themselves up when hung by their tail at the cloaca, I cut them off.(the obese colubrid swinging limp noddle test)

Often times, I'll completely avoid feeding male snakes for weeks during the breeding season to keep them lean and mean, and to pump more resources into females.
Many colubrid snakes in captive collections are Obese in my estimation, and this is one big reason why egg binding is becoming such an issue in colubrids. It's lack of exercise, poor muscle tone and too much body fat. This causes fertilization problems as well.
Feeding irregularily like I do, is primarily to make my life easier, but it probably is closer to the feeding schedule of wild snakes as well.

In the wild many baby north american colubirds don't eat much if anything from the time they hatch or are born, until the next spring. So when I hear people freaking out because they've had their baby blairs king for 3 weeks and it hasn't eaten, it 's hard to understand
Here's an interesting story... One year, I accidentally forgot a greybanded King in hibernation. I had a couple hundred boxes, so one got missed being brought out of brumation. I had over a dozen alterna so one was easily missed
I found it in the fall, when opening boxes putting the rest of the collection back into brumation. That means it was in that box for an entire year, with no food or water. Plus in the summer that room gets up to 100 degrees as there is no connection to the house ducting.
The snake was thin and drank for about 5 minutes and then ate the next day.
I fed it all winter and summer, then the season after it laid eggs just like normal

As shocking as it may sound, I feed my snakes when "I" feel like it , and have the time. I don't even record it. I have no regular schedule for doing it, and never have in all the 25 years I've been breeding. Its roughly ever couple of weeks but if varies alot and occasionally I'll go a month without feeding young holdbacks or specimens not yet breeding.

The whole rat versus mouse issue, is mostly one of economics for the keeper I think.
It's generally cheaper to feed a medium rat than it is to provide the same mass with 3 or 4 mice.

[Simon Sansom]

I think that Roy sums it up pretty well.

It basically depends upon the keeper, though, and I agree that we do tend to overfeed our animals.

I normally feed my adult colubrids once a week, regardless of specie, varying the size and number of prey items depending upon season, individual condition, etc.
Babies are usually fed once or twice a week, again depending upon species. For example, baby Trans-Pecos Rat Snakes will often regurgitate if fed more often than once weekly, and this can become an on-going syndrome. Young Cal-Kings, on the other hand, can seemingly be almost stuffed from stem to stern every other day with food and still be looking for more, lol!

I've had a Solomon Island Boa go for well over a year (13 months, I think) without food, for no obvious reason. The animal was healthy and I had fecal tests done several times. He just went off his food, and even though I'd offer him food every time I fed the other snakes, he wouldn't even look at anything, until one day out of the blue - BANG! Back on the feed-bag. Weird.

Cheers!

Simon R. Sansom

[BoidKeeper]

I feed my corns rats when ever I can. My 2003 corns that where born in August are all on 20g fuzzie rats.
Cheers,
Trevor

[Simon Sansom]

Trevor,
I agree with you. As far as I'm concerned there's no reason why corns shouldn't be on rats. It's just more efficient, in my opinion.

Cheers!

Simon R. Sansom

[jwsporty]

Great post Roy, The limp noodle comment had me splitting a gut. But so true.

Tim, regarding the apparent food size, for the most part the one on hoppers was offered two at a sitting. Occasionally it would take three but not often. the two hoppers definitely were smaller in total weight then the one adult.. Interesting though. Feeding them less nutritious food obviously doens't make any sense, hence the comparison based on mice only. I would dearly love to have all my guys on rats, but some are just simply stubborn to get going on them. And I fully agree with what you are saying regarding age, sex, time of year and food size. It is just interesting to see that the growth appears to be greater in the one eating hoppers...curious ;)

[DragnDrop]

This would be an interesting discussion in the General Discussion forum. It's not just snakes, but all species of reptile can be subjected to overfeeding by owners anxious to have theirs grow full size in the shortest possible time. It might give the owner something to brag about, but what does it do for the animal? I'm sure there could be some long term effects from being stuffed like a pate goose just to make it grow faster.

[Invictus]

Many times with my collection, being a 40+ collection with damn near everything ranging from baby corns to large boas, it's SO easy to lose track of who should be feeding when. I have a few rules of my own that I've collaborated with a few others, both on this message board and other mediums (like PHONE conversations.. who uses the PHONE anymore? lol).

If I go a month without feeding an adult colubrid or boid, whooptie *****. They are not growing, and so long as they don't start looking drastically skinny, they will be just fine. It's the baby snakes that I TRY to keep a weekly regimen with. And I do believe in feeding large, as long as they can still get it down. My baby corns (which I recently sold) have been getting 2 hoppers instead of 1 adult, because the hoppers are just easier for them to get down. But the growth has been utterly astounding. My baby boa constrictors got adult mice for their second ever feeding. My 4 foot boa constrictors get large rats, but I feed them only every 2-3 weeks.

My point with this was mainly, don't panic if your adult snakes are not on a regimen. They will be ok! Trust me! :)

[rwg]

Jim: You didn't happen to weigh the prey items did you? If you're going to attribute the different growth rates to the size of the prey item, you need to make sure that all other things are equal. Seems to me that the mass of food given is the real determinant. Hmmm..unless your point was that a snake will eat more food if you give it to him in smaller pieces. Even that you haven't established because you didn't use the same feeding frequency with both snakes.

Hmmm....I'm getting a pair of baby bull snakes pretty soon. Maybe I should set up a study. I was going to look for sexual dimorphism in growth rates. The sample size is pretty small though.

rg

[M_surinamensis]

Going back to just the topic of snake feeding for a moment, it's pretty simple...

Given equal nutritional values and an equal mass of prey- more numerous smaller prey items will be more completely digested, result in more nutrients absorbed and the offshoot of this is a stronger growth rate.

Snakes (the overwhelming majority of snakes anyway) don't chew and there is kinda minimal peristalisis, digestion is predominantly an enzyme action. Prey is digested from the outside in and the rate of digestion will depend on the surface area of the prey. More prey items of less mass per item equals greater surface area and quicker more efficient digestion.

There are of course other factors, the enzyme production is going to be influenced by genetics, temperature plays a major role, general health of the snake, density of hair or thickness of skin on the prey items and when you start mixing things like adult mice versus rat pups or crawlers versus hoppers you've got slightly different nutritional values for the prey items but the above is true, as far as it goes.

The downside to presenting this information is that it might be used to powerfeed more effectively which cuts down on the lifespan of the animal. The upside though is that individuals with underweight animals, problem feeders or pukers might have some idea of how best to get their animals back into shape (maximize the amount of absorbed nutrients) without loading jumbo rats into 'em and causing them to regurgitate.

[rwg]

I can see that increased surface area exposure leads to quicker digestion...that's simple science, but it's not obvious to me that it leads to "more efficient digestion". Can you back that up?

rg

[M_surinamensis]

Sort of...

What I meant by that was... Some larger single prey items will not be fully digested, they pass through the digestive system and are expelled as feces before the digestive process has gotten to the center or some of the denser tissues. Since quicker digestion would mean less of the prey mass remains untouched by digestive fluids, a greater amount of nutrients are actually absorbed.

Kind of a moot point most the time, since nobody will be trying to feed a neonate cornsnake a ten pound rabbit or trying to offer a fifteen foot burm several hundred pinkies but kind of worth noting in passing.

[Smulkin]

Also interested in knowing if the weight of the prey items was determined and recorded during this or whether it was just "eyeballed". Given equal weight between say a bigass rat and a few mice I'd also expect the mice to go down easier - but also that there would be more fur-covered surface area and maybe even an overall increase in nondigestible caca?

Intriguing - someone going to get a tad more empirical on this?

[Beardonicus]

but also that there would be more fur-covered surface area and maybe even an overall increase in nondigestible caca?

I was thinking the same thing.....but what Seamus said kinda answers this question....since the smaller prey items have a smaller surface area, the "good stuf" inside will be digested quicker and more easily....neutralizing the greater amount of undigestable hair, etc.

I have a male Western Hognose snake who eats anywhere from every 2-7 days depending on what leftovers I have and when he is shedding...he has shown an amazing rate of growth, much moreso than some of my other colubrids. This is a very interesting topic indeed. :)

[M_surinamensis]

That's why the first post had the line about different prey items... A prey item with less hair, no hair, thinner hair or the like would clearly change the rate of digestion, similarly the mass of indigestable tissue as it is a percentage of the whole will play a role... Mice as a general rule tend to be a bit less meaty than a rat to begin with but breeder mice, pinks and crawlers will all have greater portions of their mass as potentially digestable than a young adult male rat on a normal feeding schedule or... Well, the individual comparasins are pretty endless...

Given a sort of constant nutritional value and a constant percentage of the total prey mass as otherwise indigestable, smaller prey items offer greater surface area and will be more fully digested.

As I said though, it's pretty meaningless for most herpers most the time, since a healthy animal given a normal amount of food will digest the digestable tissues pretty well regardless. When looking to put weight on a skinny animal or when dealing with the aftermath of a regurge, the rate of nutrient uptake becomes more important.

[Classic]

I was in the train of thought that pinkie rats were much better than pinkie mice. This is one observation that is emerging in my records. Approx 3 months ago, i acquired a pair of western hognose. The male was 14 and tha female was 9 grams. The female has been eating pinkie rats on average 1/10 days. She like the bigger meal but at an extended rate. The male has only eaten pinkie mice but at a higher frequency. He is currently 26 grams and she is 17. Granted she takes longer to digest the larger meals, he is eating smaller meals but is retaining more mass. This is just a short term observation of 3 months but is does say alot.

The following is the rate of feed for the male.
Beginning weight 14 grams
6-Mar-04 1 pinkie
10-Mar-04 2 pinkie
16-Mar-04 1 pinkie
23-Mar-04 2 pinkie
1-Apr-04 2 pinkie
10-Apr-04 2 pinkie
14-Apr-04 2 pinkie
20-Apr-04 2 pinkie
21-Apr-04 1 pinkie
22-Apr-04 1 pinkie
29-Apr-04 1 pinkie rat
30-Apr-04 2 pinkie
4-Apr-04 1 pinkie
14-May-04 1 pinkie
20-May-04 2 pinkie
25-May-04 1 pinkie
26-May-04 1 pinkie
27-May-04 1 pinkie
30-May-04 2 pinkie
Current weight 26 grams

and the female
Beginning weight 9 grams
22-Mar-04 1 pinkie rat
31-Mar-04 1 pinkie rat
9-Apr-04 1 pinkie rat
21-Apr-04 1 pinkie rat
29-Apr-04 1 pinkie rat
14 may 04 1 pinkie rat
24-May-04 1 pinkie rat
27-May-04 1 pinkie rat
Current weight 17 grams

Brian