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I have always loved snakes i had a corn snake but my cousin had let him out or something she told me about a month after i had started looking for him anyway i have always admired burms. I was just looking into to getting one but i was thinking about adopting one cause i know how they are like iguanas in a sence. some People just see them in pet store and want them and then when they big they don't want them anymore so i was thinking about adopting instead of buying a baby, because burms in a shelter need a good home far more than babies. But if i had gotten a baby i was curious on how big they will get in a year. Do they go through growth spurts or what anyway
Thanx
Tyler

Hi Tyler,.. Whether you adopt or purchase a baby you will end up with a very large snake in short time. The advantages of adopting are that you may provide a good home for an otherwise neglected reptile. This is a good thing and I urge it.

The advantages of buying and raising a baby are that you can grow with your snake and thus learn to understand it and it's idiosyncrasies better than if you start out with a larger snake raised by another and which you may not understand it's existing behavior. When you raise a snake a lot of it's behavior will be that which is molded or instilled by the way you raise it. But still, I urge you to try to adopt a burmese first at a rescue or shelter.

The growth of a burmese (like that of most snakes) is never a set rate. It almost always will fluctuate and is entirely dependant on how much food the snake eats. If you feed it more, it will grow more. I have seen 3 foot yearlings, and 13 foot yearlings. Both of these figures are extremes and it is best to shoot for somewhere in the middle. If you feed your python a healthy diet of moderately generous-sized meals once per week, expanding the size of the food as the size of the python expands, then you should have a very healthy and well formed burmese roughly 7 or 8 feet.

Females and males grow at about the same rate but females will usually begin to pull away from the males when they reach about 8 or 9 feet. What I mean is that the females will continue to grow rather rapidly and males will slow down noticeably. Males tend to top out at about 11 to 13 feet and females usually get 12 to 15 feet. Though in both sexes there are individuals that become much longer and larger than the average. I feel that a lot of this is due to a diet exceeding what would compare to a "maintainence diet" (a relatively small meal regularly to inhibit excessive growth) which in my opinion is perfectly fine.

I hope this has answered most of your questions.

>>I have always loved snakes i had a corn snake but my cousin had let him out or something she told me about a month after i had started looking for him anyway i have always admired burms. I was just looking into to getting one but i was thinking about adopting one cause i know how they are like iguanas in a sence. some People just see them in pet store and want them and then when they big they don't want them anymore so i was thinking about adopting instead of buying a baby, because burms in a shelter need a good home far more than babies. But if i had gotten a baby i was curious on how big they will get in a year. Do they go through growth spurts or what anyway
>>Thanx
>>Tyler
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"If I had 365 enemies it would only take a year out of my life to settle all scores." Mia Miselfani