Reptile & Amphibian Forums

For bull keepers...

Just curious about the growth rate of some of your bulls in the first year.

Do you power feed, what type of bull..locale???

I have 2 stillwater x kingsville
I don't powerfeed, every 7 days

Snake 1 = 30 inches, 14 months old
Snake 2 = 17 inches, 7 months

Any of you have ant stats I can compare to??

Feeding schedule??

Thanks

i currently have 2 hypo bulls. both are aprox. a year old. the male is 4' and the female is 2 1/2' i'm not sure why the substancial size difference other that the fact that the male is a couple months older. i got them both as hatchlings and feed them every 4 days. i feed 2 or 3 smaller f/t items. i tried loading pics and having problems with "size"??? later...
jonathan

i tried to copy a spread sheet of data I have from a one year measurement of growth rate for 14 Louisiana pine snakes I did in 2006-07. I kept them in big cages, gave them a decent thermal gradient (68-86F day/night), and brumated them for 3 months. I don't know what powerfeeding is after all these years but anyhow, I set up a random feeding schedule by generating random numbers on a TI-83 calculator between 1 and 10. whatever the number was, that was the number of days between meals. I put the f/t food in a rubber maid bin w/ a hole in the top. If they wanted to eat they could go get it. If not they could ignore it. All meals were weighed and recorded. Snakes were weighed once a month. Snakes were measured twice using serpwidget software. The starting weight average was around 85g( if you can't figure it out from the mess below, hahahaha). The final average weight was somewhere over 560g. The average consumption was around 1500g. Sounds like a lot but 1500g is 50 mice that weigh 30g. One adult mouse a week.
I don't recall the starting avg length but the last avg length was ~38 inches.

...not bullsnakes, but close. hope I didn't bore anyone, hahaha.

daveb

init weight oct nov dec mar apr may jun jul aug length
1 68 85 126 145 155 252 304 346 458 566 1 68.55 99.49
2 65 95 142 162 190 286 353 399 501 570 2 71.34 105.05
4 69 109 150 186 204 292 356 401 497 582 4 75.38 105.28
7 74 104 133 161 160 260 321 367 479 565 7 62.83 98.93
8 69 94 123 142 168 274 331 383 461 576 8 69.01 106.8
9 74 106 140 162 181 293 366 410 495 615 9 63.52 102.56
11 87 107 151 162 191 294 371 411 494 615 11 66.77 99.72
16 105 114 152 171 196 296 348 391 474 567 16 66.21 94.51
17 104 106 146 152 171 256 329 368 423 554 17 61.46 91.82
18 94 105 137 156 181 218 301 311 332 460 18 64.33 85.47
19 101 117 177 182 211 245 285 313 383 475 19 70.99 87.35
20 78 89 139 164 189 296 356 400 488 608 20 61.79 97.33
21 66 107 132 151 261 343 393 490 592 21 62.4 98.01
22 132 132 147 174 275 354 394 492 603 22 69.97 102.41
average 84.71429 102.5833 139.6429 158.8571 180.1429 271.2857 337 377.6429 461.9286 567.7143 avg 66.75357 98.19

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in the light, you will find the road...

neat info Dave! I wonder if more and more people won't be trying different things to see what works best in maintaining herps rather than just trying to make a new morphs and money when the market fails... Anyhow, thanks for sharing!