Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I’ve been thinking of Tom’s post down thread about the pros and cons of growing snakes up slow or fast and a point came to me that I don’t think has ever been mentioned as a possible major factor and that is the QUALITY of the food that is offered. It would seem logical that abundant hi quality food would spark growth and general good health where as snakes given an abundant supply of lower quality food would tend to simply store the extra calories as fat.

Obvious I know but it’s never come up in these discussions before. I'd be interested in hearing from self avowed "power feeders" how often they order food and how long it generally stays in the freezer before it is used. I would not be surprised to hear that those who power feed successfully order food several times a season and or produce much of their own rodent supply.

Tony, good points.
I used to breed all my own mice and rats back when I had more time and not such a large collection.I think I can safley say that I had better growing healthier snakes back then.I was able to offer them whatever they preferred at any givin time and I would think that by freezing you probably loose some nutrients.
Now its sometimes hit and miss for me cause I don't have 5 different sizes of foods as all times and rats and mice both.
Shannon

I don't think the first post had any good points, yet. but you sure do. Matching the prey item size to the snake can be very very important.

In fact, oh thirty years or more ago, I would tell people it would be very difficult to excell with snakes without breeding rodents and the resulting availability of sizes and number. I will say as a mouse breeder, you have availability of any size you want these days.

Without question, feeding gaps slow down growth. Snakes grow in spurts(like most animals) If you miss feedings in a spurt, you stop the spurt. In fact, if you clean the cage during a spurt, you stop the spurt. In fact, I always feed in spurts, if a recognize a reptile in a spurt, growth or reproductive, I hit the spurt. At other times I feed sparsely if at all.

Yes, as there are physical conditions that effect growth, there are also psychological reasons as well. For instance, cleaning the cage eliminates the snakes scent. Snakes are totally scent dependant. They mark their homes and trails. Without their scent, its not theirs. So you think they have scent glands(we all know this) and incredible ability to smell(forked tongue and Jac. Organ, large collection area)for what a one line simple reason. Hmmmmmmmmmm we need to think about these things. Even insecurity causes problems. Cheers

Frank you're down as saying whole food = whole food. Two year old, half rotted, and freezer burnt product has the same nutritional value as gut loaded and fresh killed rodents. That quality of food might impact health is not a good point. Its actually more important that the cage is dirty! Who knew?

Tony you can fight and squirm all you want, your taking this dicussion into the relm of non sense.

In captivity, a normal appearing mouse is healthy enough. Consider, there is forty plus years of successful colubrid rearing and reproduction for a decent history.

Where on earth do you think all these morphs came from??? from generations of captive breeding. My bet, those involved in these generations, never worried about gut loading. Or if a mouse was slightly funky.

In my experience which is very long and successful. I never worried one bit about gut loading or how fit one prey item was. Of course, if I used common sense. Do not feed obese mice to anything. Don't feed deseased mice. Don't feed leather mice(extreme freezer burn) But to worry about the vitamin content of each mouse is just plain naive.

One common bad habit of us old cheap keepers is, many of us(me included) would have a junk snake or two. Not that the snake was junk, but we fed it junk. Like, regurged mice from other snakes, or old rotten mice, not consumed by other snakes. The universal result was, these junk snakes seem to do much betteror as well as the ones we the ones we fed the prime diet too. Sad, but kinda funny.

To me, when folks go about with the gut loading, or power feeding things, they are simply expressing their naivity. And are grasping at straws.

Just consider the millions of generations of colubrids reared and produced with everyday mice.

Sir no offense, but dude, look around you. All these folks are raising snakes and having all sorts of fun and NOT DWELLING on those dumb things. Cheers

Frank if you weren’t so overly impressed with yourself you might have a little higher opinion of and the capacity to appreciate things discussed on this forum that you didn’t originate. Fact is there wasn’t anything dumb or naïve about the original post(mine or Toms). I’d say again we were just exploring an aspect of feeding that may make the difference between snakes growing large OR just betting fat but I wont. Last thing I want to do is come across as naïve by trying to engage a dinosaur!

Guezz, i guess if you have nothing about the snakes, then attack FR, how original. Good on you.

Now consider, I am not the one with the unanswered questions or problems with large fast growing snakes having any sort of problem other they living to long.

The problem you so boldly avoid is the WORD fat. When you say fat, its not a feeding problem but a metabolism problem. But hey, you somehow cannot get a grasp of that, so you attack me. To bad. only YOUR snakes will suffer. Cheers

Believe what you wish Frank but every single assumption you've made on this thread has been dead wrong.

O.k. but how do we come up with a description of "quality"?
Seriously, what makes a "quality" mouse??
Are there major differences in a wild mouse/rat from a lab/home bred strain? (as far as nutritional values that is)
Is lean better than fat?? (I assume it is)
Anyone "power feed" their kings strictly snakes?? Anoles?? Skinks, etc?
Differences there?
I have noticed like you, that those with a readily available supply of food will feed their more often and think just the sheer amount and frequency is what optimizes the growth we're talking about. Obviously someone with limited resources or whatever won't be able to feed as often or at a rate that someone with an abundant supply will, I think.
Friends that breed their own mice often have snakes that make mine look tiny in comparison. Depending on my mice production..
:Mark
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Surrender Dorothy!

www.crimsonking.funtigo.com

Good question Mark and one I don’t really have an answer for! I know what I look for but I think it’s pretty subjective. I generally try to go with a producer who has been around for awhile and has a positive reputation for service. If he is concerned with taking care of his customers he’s likely concerned about the quality of his product. He is also likely NOT to be the cheapest guy out there.

When I receive the product I look to see how fresh it looks, is it covered with frost or freezer burn? When thawed is it overly wet or covered with fecal material and or urine, does it smell bad? A good general rule of thumb for me is that if it’s bad enough that I feel uncomfortable touching and handling it; I don’t want to feed it to my animals!

If we have to buy I think it’s inevitable that we loose some nutritional value due to the freezing process but from what I understand the value continues to decrease the longer it stays in the freezer. Given this, optimally how much supply should we keep on hand? Is the quality between a month old frozen mouse significantly different that that of one that’s been in the freezer for a year? These are questions I don’t have an answer for but I am interested in what others have to say.

I have to ask, are they eating donuts????? or chicken strips. You see, most people feed kingsnakes mice or birds or rats. These are whole natural food items. As such contain all needed ingredients.

Maybe those canned snake foods are suspect? I do not know. But if anything is consistant with colubrids its diet.

On the otherhand, most people forget snakes are reptiles and as such do not live in a world of constant conditions, but instead utilize a world of many and varied conditions. This is where the problem is. Apples may not be apples.

For instance, what is the resting heartrate of a kingsnake? a neonate? young adult? old adult? you see with mammals, its known but is anything about this known with reptiles?

Heartrate indicates energy use or level of metabolism. Does anyone know anything about this????? has anyone checked their animals heartrate???? at any time??? in winter? in summer? at night? in the day? how about an excited snake vs. a resting snake?????

The problem is, we are dicussing the end product, without any common knowledge of the process. Cheers

Hmm, I wonder if anyone has ever done that sort of a test, I'd imagine it would be very difficult to do.
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-J.Hill

I’m NOT discussing the “end product without any common knowledge of the process” I’m discussing the process by asking about AN aspect of AN input that might lead to desirable results or “end product”.

This is just my humble opinion but, IF heavily fed captive animals are GROWING bone, tissue and muscle mass AND living long PRODUCTIVE lives instead of PUTTING ON fat and dieing early, their metabolism is healthy. The concept that you need to know their heart rates at various conditions to draw this conclusion is silly. If you are looking to quantify the effect of any given input within controlled experiments, I’ll agree heart rate would be one way to gain an objective measurement but I don’t believe it’s necessary for us to so completely dissect the process to know if what we are doing is leading to desired results.

One aspect that you seem to forget is that the discussions here are primarily about captive animals and that the “end product” might vary between different keepers. Some breeders might want three large clutches a year from a female king, others might be happy, or prefer, a smaller single clutch, other keepers still may not desire their animals to reproduce every year if at all! Given the proper inputs, the varied processes required to achieve different end results need not be destructive or unhealthy for the animals.

Another thing too, I think it safe to say that you aren’t the only one here who knows snakes are reptiles as well as something about their biology. Most of us are perfectly capable of taking clues from what these animals do in the wild and developing and discussing husbandry practices that keep our animals healthy and that give us the results we want without your constant droning on that we don’t know apples from apples.

I am sorry if I often you, I really am. But this question of "powerfeeding" is just plain stupid. No offense.

If an individuals animal is hungry, it eats and has the conditions to process that food, it grows quickly. To not grow quickly when food is available, is very dangerous with wild animals.

If there is sufficent food, it grows large. When wild snakes do this, they choose from a very wide temperature and humidity range. Nature provides a huge range to suit their needs. To me that is what a reptile does, it chooses conditions to suit its CURRENT needs. Not, 85.7 but may include that.

Normally where snakes live, the wide temp range is consistant. That is, its way above/below their needs. They can choose what works the best for that particular task. Once temps become to low to properly function, they go dormate or die. Same goes for too high.

Prey abundance is a huge variable. Extremely abundant in some years/months/weeks, not so abundant at other times and totally gone at others. The snakes adjust their metabolism accordingly.

In the case of colubrids, their prey is often/regionally seasonal, so their metabolism is adjusted to the prey with an association to a season/s. In captivity YOU control this, not letting them.

Those of you who take about "power feeding" seem to not understand reptiles. That is why I question your understanding of reptiles and why I bring that up.

Reptiles, often live in areas where they must feed as much as possible to gain enough energy to go long periods of time, then reproduce. In this they power feed all on their own and without human assistance. They power feed as much as they can. But surely this abundance will not last forever. Some years its longer then others, some years they can only find enough food to exsist. Never once or twice a week, that has nothing to do with reptiles, and everything to do with human scheduling.

I fail to understand how 84.6F reflects anything but an average condition. That will only reveal average results. Nature does not limit itself to average, and thats particularly true with reptiles. They take advantage of good times to get threw bad times. Average is taking the high and the low and dividing by 2. While books(humans)list averages, the animals do not seek to be average. They seek to excell.

Again, a snake feeding voluntarily, can never be considered "power feeding" its simply feeding when hungry. But if its individual keeper fails to provide more then average conditions for this animal to process its food, it surely will fail.

But if the keeper understands, that a wide range of conditions permits a wide range of results, then these animals exceed extremely well.

Of course, being human, and not really using our brains, we will raise up an individual snake to a large size, then feed it what we feed the smaller brothers and wonder why it fails. The bigger they get, the more it takes to support them. YOU as the keeper have to adjust to this, and not fall back on your old average habits. After all, your new larger individual is no longer average.

What I find so dang funny is, with all this power feeding, there are no records of giant individuals. Just lots of larger then average individuals. Nature still holds all and I mean all the growth records. IT does because it have a wide range of conditions that will allow full potential, at times.

Theres a saying, its a fool who keeps doing the same thing and expects different results. Lets reverse it, its a fool that sees something exceptional and thinks the same old thing caused it.

So yes, I truly question those who bring up this "power feeding" I think they fail to understand reptiles. They may be great at following caresheets, but really do not understand the animal. Cheers

p.s. To me, power feeding is force feeding, that is, feeding an animal that does not want to eat.

Frank you don't affend me but you are starting to bore the heck out of me. You're so busy putting out your same old line that you completely miss the point of conversations. Personally I think that you've got more to offer than that.

A few things I was told come to mind. One was that pinkies away from their mothers for a few hours lose a lot of their nutrients as they dehydrate very quickly.
Along that line of thought who knows how much the actual milk from the mother mice ingested in the pinkies benefits the snakes eating those pinkies? I like to take mine right off the mother and toss em right into cages,
Another time someone told me no matter what we feed mice in captivity with all these supplemented feeds, it would not match things they ingest in nature. An example he gave was a rodent drinking off a puddle on a rock. Something like the minerals added to that water give that rodent something people can not duplicate in labs. This person also went on to tell me lots of herpers who have kept snakes for decades seem to agree live is better than frozen.
I have to wonder as at times I have caught fish and fried them on a campfire shortly after they were caught and wether I imagined it or not, they seemed to be tastier. Some people who shop for meat at the store want the absolute freshest cut of beef they can get their hands on....how much does it matter?? Couldn't tell you
The only problem I have with frozen rodents is I have had a few bad experiences where I thawed some and they stunk, I felt they were not up to par and I threw tons in the garbage. All in all, if I had access to them and could afford it, I think I'd feed all my snakes live.
On the flip side of the coin, I bet some nasty bacteria filled rotten food may occasionally benefit a snake in some way...but it is not something I would do on purpose. Though I did have a snake or two that I'd feed uneaten rodents too, some were damn stinky and looking rough and the snakes ate em and had no ill effects.
I also know some people supplement rodents with powdered vitamins. I have not, but I may try some this year. I just stick with mice n rats, and occasionally a non feeder Corn gets served as dinner for a King. We discussed on here at one point how the color of offspring from snakes fed quail may be more vividly colored than snakes that fed on rodents due to something in the birds makeup.... Well, that's enough outa me for a minute...lemme think a bit more Tom Stevens
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TomsSnakes.com

Hey Tom, thanks for the well thought out reply. Never heard that about the pinks being away from the mother thing but it would seem to make sense that at very least the caloric value of a pink could be equated to how soon they were processed.

I once bred most of my own rodents and used to say that any good reptile breeder had to first be a good rodent breeder but times change and I no longer desire to spend my time in a rodent room. Still, I was very successful in raising animals faster when I had live on hand. A large part was due to always having just the perfectly sized wiggly tidbit to offer my snakes but I think that what and how I fed my rodents also had an impact. Their base diet was a good quality rodent chow but it was regularly augmented with other feeds such as quality bird seed mixtures and even fresh produce. In the winter when mouse production exceeded usage I would process and freeze the excess for use in the summer when demand exceeded my production. I believe that the way I processed them also had an impact. Once I had enough animals to process I would gut load them on produce for a 24 hour period before putting them down using cervical dislocation (how we did it in college). I would then lay them belly down onto an absorbent sheet of paper so that any released urine would be drawn away from them while they cooled to room temperature (cooling prevented the formation of frost during the freezing process). Once they were cooled, I would check to make sure no fecal matter was adhering to them and layer about 20 medium adults into quart sized zip-lock bags. This amount would lay flat in the bag and I could press most of the air out of the bag before dating and sealing the bags and putting them in the freezer. Needless to say the first bags frozen were the first bags used come summer. Back in the day my snakes relished these over the occasional “lab surplus” mice I had to buy to see me through lean times.

Its pretty well accepted that gut loading is important for the good husbandry of lizards and it think it’s quite possible that this is overlooking in snake breeding. In the wild rodents aren’t eating seeds year round. Likely in the spring when seed predation has reduced the supply I would think rodent diets are largely composed of seed sprouts and grass shoots. From a cyclical perspective the rodent’s lower calorie green diet, higher in nutrients and beta-carotenes might just facilitate calcium metabolism required for sperm motility and egg calcification of snakes who are also basking in the early season sunlight. Don’t know if there is any merit to any of this but it is the reason that I use supplements weekly during the spring and monthly the rest of the year. Since doing so I have not had a single female egg bind on me

I see the majority of mice offered by most suppliers are males. I wonder if females have any more nutrition in them? Since mice are capabel of producing litters so frequently does that mean there's extra nutrition in them???Since they produce milk and males don't I am not starting to think they do. Tom Stevens
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TomsSnakes.com

Tony what kinds of fresh produce did you feed them?

Collards mostly because they are a cold season crop and readily available but anything that was trimmed from the the fresh veggies the family was eating would be thrown in. Also if we had some old oranges laying around I'd cut them in half and put them in. The mice would strip them clean overnight.

Great topic..here's some personal experiences I'd like to share.
Before moving to Fort Worth I had to buy my rodents frozen. Since moving here I now have acess to a large rodent supply live or frozen. About once per week I pick up my feeders feed them off and freeze the rest. I have notice a distinct difference in health for the majority of my breeders and an almost 50% rise in egg production. This company uses lab chow for feed and I believe this is a pretty well rounded source of nutrition. I have been breeding reptiles for over 12 years now ,much of this time I fed the same way. Thaw out a corpse once a week and load them up(snakes), I wanted fast growth rates so I would push them and feed them large items, which later on led to many complications usually due to weight. Now that I have a supply just a couple minutes down the road, a supply in which on a weekly basis I can get any size or type of rodent I need my feeding habits have changed. Today I feed on an average of 2-3x per week, but I feed very small items barley enough to cause a lump. What I have noticed is that most snakes put through this routine grow at a phenominal rate, are MUCH more active since there not spending most of there time digesting, but instaed constantly roam there cage looking for food. My production is way up with 2x clutches common place and almost impossible to prevent. Many species like hognose snakes, corns etc reach a size of 200-300grams in a year on this feeding schedule, kings and milks don't grow as fast but compared to previous growth rate almost 2x the average. I just weighed some holdback corns and hogs that are about 5 months old and they weigh in 70-80g on average the hogs are around 15-16in and the corns are well over 24in. Cellulite (those little lumpy deposits) which use to be common in my ruthveni,corn and sinaloan collections has almost disappeared, and is not present in most of my stock raised up with this feeding schedule.
So what is your take on this experience, is frequency, size and freashness of the food as important a factor as the many discussed here..it certainly seems so from where I am sitting.
Regards,
Justin Mitcham
ExtremeHogs.com