Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hello all,

Just in case anyone is curious, here's some of the things that I keep track of with my burm (and separately for each of my other four snakes). I have more than this on file, but this is the basic stuff that I pay attention to.

This chart shows his growth history as it relates to his meal size over the past couple of years: (the curve fitting in this and the next chart is polynomial to the order of 2)

This one shows how his weight has increased relative to his length over the past few years:

This (last one, I promise!) is just a record of his feeding schedule and shedding frequency/duration:

If I dare to venture into making some extrapolations from what I have here, I would expect that although his growth lengthwise is tapering along with his meal size, his weight is increasing faster than his lengthwise growth - or, in other words - he's getting fat! Its also interesting and somewhat comforting to me that he has eaten and shed on a relatively regular basis.

Ok - I am an incredible geek - I know, I know!

Thanks for looking,
- Mark
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My personal site: www.antegy.com
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Me on myspace.com

Pretty impressive charts. It must take alot of your time for you to maintain these stats and log everything.

It actually doesn't take much of any time. I only measure and weigh them once every couple of months, and it only takes a minute to record when they eat and shed.

So, in the end I get a lot of information without having to invest a lot of time.

Most of my time is spent either playing with them, or cleaning up after them.

Thanks,
- Mark

>>Pretty impressive charts. It must take alot of your time for you to maintain these stats and log everything.

I stumbled across your data posting on the photo gallery and had to track your posting down. I’m currently in my third statistics class of my college career and I got a little excited seeing my hobby being mixed with my schoolwork. I hope you don’t mind me making a few comments about the data. Kudos to you for recognizing that meal size and frequency of feeding aren’t the only factors affecting the growth rate. You could make some predictions on burms if you had more snakes. You have some inconsistency in the feeding of your snake, for example you used the same food size at 10½ ft and 7 ft. the number of feedings in the six month intervals looks like 5,21,15,8,8. In order for us to be able to tell how strong of an influence weight and frequency of feeding have on the growth of the snake we must have a clear independent variable. It is unclear that the blue line is the independent variable because the size of his food was dictated by the size of the snake (ex. you can’t feed a baby snake an adult rat). It would be a huge pain but your data would be better if you had used a ratio to dictate the size of the food it should be feed (say the length times 100= weight of food in grams to use). I recognize the commitment a big snake like this is and you probably won’t have many more in the future. Since you have other snakes try to make your feedings closer to the line and see what the effect is. Judging by the photos you have it looks like you have a perfect size and healthy looking animal. Your data paints a clear picture of what kind of feeding schedule to use and the cost of feeding the animal is. I just purchased a digital scale and I’m going to use your data as a guide for feeding my 3-month-old burm. I’ll try to post the results for you. thanks for the good stuff.