I have found that my ball pythons are far more likely to eat smaller prey than larger items, so if your snake seems to turn it’s nose up at the food offered you may want to try feeding something a little smaller. Thus a hatchling may need tiny mice, while larger adults may eat adult rats.īe aware, however, that there is a lot of flexibility in this. This should be no larger than the fattest part of your snake.

When selecting a prey item for your snake, the easiest process is to think of the circumeference of the item. What Size Food Should I Give My Ball Python? If you are unlucky enough to find your ball python suffers from any health issues in the future, such a chart can also be of great interest to your vet, allowing them to spot anything obviously wrong. Combine this with regular health checks and weigh-ins and you’ll be in the perfect place to assess your ball pythons health and appetite. Keep records of what food was offered on what dates, and whether it was accepted. One of the best things you can do is to start a feeding chart for your ball python. Note that these timings aren’t “fixed” some pythons will eat far more regularly than others, while moving your snake from one type of food to another can also affect the feeding regime. While each keeper has their own routine, personally I feed my youngsters twice a week initially, slowly increasing the time between feedings to roughly once a week for my adults. At the same time, ball pythons can be lazy, and some specimens do seem to get a little overweight. How Often Should I Feed My Ball Python?īall pythons can grow surprisingly quickly when they are well fed. Let’s start at the beginning, in case you’re just planning to get your very first ball python… What Do Ball Pythons Eat?īall pythons are carnivores, and need to be fed meat on a regular basis.īased on the size of the python and the ease of finding food, this tends to mean rodents in captivity the vast majority of ball pythons are fed on either rats or mice of a suitable size. We also known from past experience that so long as your python isn’t losing condition that this extended fast likely isn’t anything to worry about.īut we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We know, for example, that it is reasonably normal for ball pythons to go off their food in the winter months, and that adult males seem particularly prone to this. In addition, we as hobbyists have learned much about these pythons. These captive bred specimens tend to adapt to captivity much better, generally being calmer and less prone to stress. Largely wild-caught adult pythons have been replaced by a mind-blowing array of captive bred specimens in an almost infinite array of colors and patterns. At the time, some keepers were advocating not handling ball pythons at all, as they believed the stress was one factor in their refusal to eat. They also developed a bad reputation for going off food for long periods of time and for generally being fussy eaters. When I first started to keep reptiles in the 1990’s ball pythons were still seen as something very unusual and exotic.Īny mention of a “python” drew awe from other people, and with their stout, chunky bodies they really were something totally different to the corn snakes and garter snakes that were prevalent at that time.

Machacha ball phython