I saw in your picture that you had them all together. If they are being housed this way they most likely wont feed. They need to be housed seperately with a hide box.

I think you'll definitely need to go with live. Out of all the snakes I've hatched and established, I can only think of 1 carpet python that actually took F/T for a first meal. I start all of my babies on crawler mice (somewhere between a fuzzy and a hopper). They are perfect...large enough and enough movement to be attractive, but not too intimidating. Go for a colored one as opposed to white (again, my experience is that some babies really seem to prefer darker mice, especially at first).

Now on to my question. Alot of folks say to start them on rat pinks or pups so as to not have the trouble of changing them over to rats later on. Again speaking from experience, baby balls are super easy to switch over...if you do it at the right time. Baby balls go into a phase after they've eaten 5 or 6 times where they are just super aggressive feeders. During that phase, balls will east just about anything. Most of mine will take a FT weaned/small rat the first time its offered. I have never had one that took more than a couple of patient trys to get switched. Once they take the first rat, there's no looking back. The key is the patient presentation of the FT rat on hemostats, and to get the rat good and warm.

Hope I've helped some...P.S. Balls will readily switch from lived to PK during that same feeding frenzy period.

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