Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I would like to personally thank you for earlier sharing your halved pink technique with all of us here. I used it tonight on the few thayeri holdouts I had here... notice I described them as "had"... they are no longer holdouts. These few were exceptionally small individuals and they took the pink halves like champions.

You are THE MAN... and I go to sleep tonight a very happy old fart to say the least.

Thank you very much for sharing that Russ.

Mike

glad to hear it Mike. It has always worked for me and I stumbled upon this process one summer when I was in a pinch for pink feeders. In my opinion, it is better to feed a snake a smaller meal and avoid any opportunity for regurge.

Glad it worked. Now if I could just find the genetically misfit mice that produce baby halves

Later,
Russ

I totally agree with that.

And how about this... a rodent production facility that would specialize in a smaller breed of mouse alongside their normal sized ones, to produce smaller pinks just for this purpose. I think it would be a reasonably lucrative side business. Seems like day old frozen pinks are getting bigger on the average.

Mike

You know Deer mice are about half the size as a regular ole white mouse.....
But...It is the smell of the open wound that gets them to eat...That is why brained live pinks have worked for me the last 5 years...The movement along with the brain matter scent seems to trigger them to feed....
A couple years ago I bought a Mexmex female from LLL Reptiles...It ended up being a male, but different story....
A feeding card came with the snake and it had a feeding history of 5 meals...ALL split pinks, so I split pinks until it finally took a whole one. I never really tried splitting pinks again, but the size of one of my hatchlings will definitely provoke me to try a split pink......
And yes....Thanks Russ for sharing information with everyone.

John Lassiter

I have read of Deer mice and think they would be a good possibility. Agreed... the gooey stuff in the middle sparks their interest but the overall size intimidates these guys at any age. I see it here with all of my animals to some degree, more so with certain individuals so the halved pink approach is on the right track with the babies. I also feel that the bulk of the item is important, not just length and a day old Deer mouse pink would meet both criteria... shorter in length and not as big around. I also think they accept compromises between length and bulk, I watch all of them eat... babies through adult... and most of them thouroughly investigate the item, obviously considering length and bulk at the same time. They seem to be able to compromise and accept a longer item that is slimmer, or a bulky item that is much shorter in length, but naturally the bulk can't bee too large no matter the length. If it is too long and bulky, they shy away. I would venture to guess that if we had a good supply of these tiny Deer mouse pinks, most smaller babies would take brained f/t fairly quickly.

Mike

I'm definately going to give this a try on my newbies too. I've got 2 that are pretty small.