|
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.
__________________
-Seamus Haley
"Genes, Like Leibnitz's monads, have no windows; the higher properties of life are emergent... And once assembled, organisms have no windows." - Edward Wilson, Sociobiology
|
:
Linear Mode
