Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I'm curious if anyone has some tables of general rules of thumbs for growth and feeding of rat snakes. Such as:

- Average length at birth, 3mo, 6 mo, 1 yr, etc.
- Average weight for various lengths
- Typical max food size for various lengths.
- Grams of food per week by length or weight.

deg

easiest way is just to take each snake individually. some can't handle bigger food...causes regurgs. Not common, but happens.

I never pay attention to the actual weight of the prey I feed, nor have I ever correlated it with a length. Because mainly when figuring out the size of the prey you want to go on girth not length.
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Chondros and colubrids... my 2 favorite types of snakes!

"Life is hard. Life is harder if you're stupid." - John Wayne

Heres generally what I do.
Start off with 1 pinky, then when pinkies become invisible in the snake after ingestion, I bump up to 2 pinkies for a short while, maybe 5-10 feedings. Then I go to fuzzies, then for the same reason with pinkies, I'll go to 2 fuzzies, then a short while later a medium to large mouse. I dont like small mice because they dont seem to have much meat on them so I feel it's a waste to even buy them.
It's all about the perceived lump in a snake after it's fed.
When snakes are small, they're able to grow rapidly, so feedings are about a week apart, but as you get up to 2-3 full grown mice in a feeding, then I slow down to about once every 2 weeks or so.
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Tom
TCJ Herps
"The more people I meet, the more I like my snakes"

Wild baby snakes generally double their hatchling lengths in the first year. A captive should do the same, IMHO, or perhaps a little better.

Average hatchling size varies from species to species, so I can't help there.

Paul Hollander