Hi Dave,

We are working with a large group of Nicaraguans right now, so I will try to answer your questions based on our experiences with them... I hope this helps!

While the temp. requirements and feeding requirements of Nic's are the same as other BCI, I have found that caring for Nic's is a whole lot easier for one very important reason...their size!! Our biggest adult female is barely 6 feet long. Most of our other adult females are somewhere around 5 1/2 feet max. Also, Nicaraguans don't get anywhere near as thick as Colombians. I can easily handle the adult Nic's on my own to clean cages and such, but there is no way that I could handle some of our adult female Colombians without my dad helping...they are just too heavy and muscular for me to move alone. Because of their smaller size, Nic's don't demand the same cage space as Colombians. We are moving all of our Nic's into Roylance rack systems, and I wish I could think of the dimensions of them, but I can't so I will just say that there is no way I would put an adult female Colombian in one of them!

Nic's tend to breed sooner than Colombians or other BCI, and they seem to be easier to breed as well. We haven't had a litter of Nic's born here yet (next season we hope to have lots!) so the only answers I could give you about raising babies would be based on the farm born babies that we have. I have found them to be hardier in some ways than even Colombians. They seem less sensitive in that we have never had a baby regurgitate a meal, and we have LOTS of baby Nics. Sometimes the farm born Colombians will get sick once or twice while they adjust, but the Nics don't seem to have that problem. Some of ours are pickier eaters as Hoppy mentioned, but we have so many that there are bound to be a few in the bunch that are picky. Most of ours eat well. Also, I attribute that to them being farm born as opposed to captive bred. I am thinking that the captive born babies will all be fine. As far as aggression...some of the babies were a little nippy when we first got them, but we just handled them and took a few nips here and there while they were newborns, and now they are fine. I handled almost every single one of our Nics the other day while I was cleaning, and none of them showed the least bit of aggression.

Here's one of our normal Nic's as a baby:

You can see another picture of one of our normals in a post below by my father that was a follow up to a question on smaller boas.

Here's a hypo:


Our Nic Ghost when we first got him:


An adult Type II Anery:


And our favorite, our female T+ Albino Nic!:


That's alot of pics and this was a long post, but I hope it helps!
Amanda

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