Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I've heard of this http://www.snakesandfrogs.com/scra/snakes/images/mossrat2.jpg with boas or pythons, but not with black rats. Anyone here ever feed prey this large? Does this mean I can move my hatchling up to small fuzzies? lol

I wouldn't do it. I would think it would cause strain on their digestive systems. That's not to say they can't do it...as the picture shows. In the case of wild adult snakes, they would likely go after a nestful of pinkies/fuzzies, rather than try and tackle a rabbit. As everyone knows, snakes are opportunistic feeders (most of them anyways), so there will be times here and there where they will be hungry enough to try and eat large prey. But, that doesn't mean they should be fed such large prey regularly. Case in point, a large African Rock Python can take down a gazelle, but I'm sure they would be just as content to grab more manageable prey, like a rabbit or other mammals smaller than gazelles.

Bry

No, I was just kidding. Recently I was asked whether it was OK to make the switch to fuzzies, so when I saw that pic (or series of pics) I just had to laugh. Does it look to you like someone killed that rabbit and fed it to that snake? All the pics I see of wild snakes eating large prey are a great deal messier than that one, with coils all over the place, and they usually don't look nearly so comfortable as that.

Back when I was in high school, we had a 5 foot Black Rat that I had found in the woods near Richmond Va. At the same time we had a rabbit that was being kept in a large bird cage. One day, someone let the snake get loose. The next morning, we found the rabbit missing and a very well fed snake a day later. The snake was able to get into the cage, eat the rabbit, and then get out of the same cage that the rabbit couldn't.

I have also found Black Rats in the wild with prey in them so large that the rows of scales looked like stripes in the center of the snake. It seems that they can and do take down large prey items in the wild, but I think that for the most part, much smaller animals make up their diet.

Look at the pics again and think "lots of fur"... (Fuzzies won't compress like that.)

Also, I haven't seen rat snakes use thier bodies much while eating, whereas pythons do tend to hold the prey with thier coils, so those pics lok pretty reasonable to me.