Great advice Rob. I agree with your interpretation of the so called wall. It makes seance to rest them out of season. We have moved all our snakes on to once every two weeks including 300 to 400g grow ons. They eat a good sized multi and seem to be growing at the same rate as weekly feeders from the previous year. We save on cleaning time and our snakes are more relaxed. Feeding day is a lot quicker. I wish I had seen a video like this one 3 years ago.
Hi Paul. My new hatchlings are fed every 5 to 7 days until they get that robust healthy look after a few sheds then I drop them back to 7 days, but I don't freak out if they go 10 days to 2 weeks without eating. I tend to feed a decent sized prey item even to my smaller snakes and I have not noticed any difference in growth rate with any of these regimes. They grow at the rate they grow. The difference is purely in how much of the food comes out of the other end! Snakes fed less use the food they do eat more efficiently. I would add that supercharged metabolic rates in young snakes does encourage fast growth (and more poop) and doesn't seem to adversely effect them, at least initially. It's their job to get as big as possible as fast as possible. Every bit of size they can gain increases their chances of survival in the wild. But sooner or later, they start to take on the metabolic rate and feeding frequency or their larger counterparts and will hit a wall if they are overfed. They self regulate unlike humans!
Not a breeder but it is nice to hear a breeder obeying natures clock and not their clock even though human nature sometimes or inexperience to wanna force things.
Thank you. I'm glad we have a wide audience here. I'm a firm believer that nature knows best, at least as far as a captive environment allows nature to work. We work with it rather than try to override it.
Rob... that section of the snake breeding behaviour 🤣 no perfume, etc oh dear lord I'm taking that and making the "ooh yeah baby" a ringtone for when you text me 🤣🤣🤣 The concept of the wall how you explained it made absoloute sense. And I commented on the community page about not experiencing this phenomenon myself and now I also see why. My feeding regime is basic and kind of inline with your breeding build up. My hatchlings or really young snakes eat weekly. As soon as they hit a bigger size perhaps 500-800g then they go for food every 2 weeks. With the females I'm pairing they're now destroying food once a week and sometimes eat an offering that's been refused by another. Without giving my method a title or a specific reason, I'd say its pretty much the same as you've explained .. but I've done this through trial and error, and ultimately listening to my snakes. I've listened to weekly feeders, I've followed there advice and if it works for them... Good on em, I tried it, it didn't work for me, and in general I have no issues with refusals, cleaner tubs, and less expense all round. There are the odd exception I admit, but if I have a picky feeder, it's because she is just that and has always been this way, I have explanations as to why ( self blame entirely) but as for the 1kg wall.. ive yet to experience that, if I do at all. All the best mate and thanks for that seductive image of Rob being a girl for 30 seconds 👍
Hi mate. Thanks for the vote of confidence! As with all my videos, take the bits that you like and try them out. Disregard the bits that don't or wont work for you. We all have to find a way that works for us with our own setups in our own country with our own snakes.
Cycling food makes more sense than temperature. In their natural habitat food, and perhaps barometric pressure would vary more than temperature. Love yor channel.
Thanks mate. Let me kick off the discussion by saying temperature cycles and introducing males early does seem to work in many cases. A quick fix or a "workaround" for the less patient. The reason I believe it works is by introducing a bit of stress to our snakes to encourage them to "breed to survive". Is it necessary to do this? No, almost certainly not, if we are a bit more patient. We also run the risk of pushing this stress too far. Our males go off food, our collections are susceptible to seasonal infections such as bacterial RI and we run the risk of killing the odd female from "forced" breeding when they are on a different schedule to the one that suits us. The 1000gm wall can occur for many reasons if our husbandry or a myriad other factors are not on point. It can also happen at any time to any snake. The real reason its an issue is when it occurs in 1200gm females we are desperate to breed that season. If she breeds this time next year, rather than this year, why is that an issue? Surely the snake is more important? Can we use "stress" to override nature? Yes we can. Should we do it? I can't answer that question because the answer will be different for different people.
Another great video Rob!! And so refreshing compared to so many other breeders who advocate pairing females far too early imo. It sounds like food cycling is a very ethical way to encourage females to be ready to breed at a time that is right for them whilst also giving their digestive system a rest.
Glad you enjoyed it Laura. Science usually has the edge over anecdotal or legacy breeding techniques and I hope this promotes a greater understanding of snake physiology. Because much of snake behavior is obligate or instinctive, it is relatively easy to trick our snakes into breeding when they are not really physically prepared to do so and their physiology pretty much compels them to try. Nothing is more annoying as a scientist to hear a fellow breeder say snakes don't carry scales in the wild and they will breed when they are ready. Pure nonsense with no thought for snake biology.
@@RobertBarracloughRoyalBalls well yes. I think people use that statement as an excuse to breed females at lower weights than what is healthy. It is our responsibility to look after them as best we can and that includes not putting them under pressure to breed too early when they don’t have enough reserves for the process.
Amen brother! Thank you for sciencing it up for me! LOL! That’s not a word. After a decade of keeping and breeding ball pythons, these are the conclusions I’ve come to as well. We feed way too much! They are not built to eat every week. It’s too much!
Another great video with very great information Rob, your channel has been an amazing source of information and learning for me. I agree that we probably over feed our pythons/boa species. With my pythons and boas I feed them every 7 to 10 days for the first month or two I have them to make sure they are feeding well for me and then spread out their feedings to about every 14 days (sometimes more and sometime less) as well as feeding them smaller rather than larger meals. Pythons and boas are VERY efficient at making the most of each meal they get.
Hi Jacob. Thanks for watching and contributing. I'll repeat a reply to a previous comment because it fits here as well. My new hatchlings are fed every 5 to 7 days until they get that robust healthy look after a few sheds then I drop them back to 7 days, but I don't freak out if they go 10 days to 2 weeks without eating. I tend to feed a decent sized prey item even to my smaller snakes and I have not noticed any difference in growth rate with any of these regimes. They grow at the rate they grow. The difference is purely in how much of the food comes out of the other end! Snakes fed less use the food they do eat more efficiently. I would add that supercharged metabolic rates in young snakes does encourage fast growth (and more poop) and doesn't seem to adversely effect them, at least initially. It's their job to get as big as possible as fast as possible. Every bit of size they can gain increases their chances of survival in the wild. But sooner or later, they start to take on the metabolic rate and feeding frequency or their larger counterparts and will hit a wall if they are overfed. They self regulate unlike humans!
Great video Rob. Love this detailed explanation of your food cycling in preparation for breeding and particularly interested in your thoughts on the 1000g wall. I’ve heard many ideas on the wall but never this one although it makes perfect sense with the “afterburners” having burnt out and needing a break. What I have learned to do is not worry about a snake not eating. I guess like most new keepers I used to really worry if a snake missed 2 or 3 feeds on the trot but now I don’t think about it much at all. I have for example a leopard pied girl who was a very aggressive feeder and went from 245g when o got her in March 2021 to 1347g almost a year to the day later at which stage she went of food and did nothing but sit under her hide for the next 4 1/2 months. She wasn’t interested in food in the slightest. That would have scared me to death initially but it didn’t phase me and often I wouldn’t even bother to offer her food as she would stay under her hide while the room was scented and clearly had no interest in it. Then at the end of July with no warning she came out and took up something of an ambush position so I offered her food at the next feeding which she showed some interest in but didn’t take however the following feed she took a rat and 6 weeks later is pounding food. Interestingly during that 4 1/2 month fast she only lost about 80g so as you say clearly had plenty of reserves and she has put on all than and more in 6 weeks as she prepares for her first breeding season. I’ll be putting the pastel clown 66% het pied male to her to hopefully prove him out and if not to produce some leopard double hets so just got to hope that she’s done what she needed to do in order to be ready to give us a nice clutch. Fantastic video mate!
Thanks Ed. I don't want to normalise not eating, but the fact is our snakes are physiologically designed not to eat for extended periods, so we shouldn't really be surprised when they exercise this ability. As long as your snake is healthy and has good parameters, so you know it's not you or something you did, they will do this from time to time with no ill effects. In fact I think they actually need to do this from time to time. For a new keeper or someone with only one snake (so nothing to compare it to) it can be stressful. Rather than fight it, I have actually incorporated food cycling into my normal regime and find it actually works very well.
Hi Carl. I know some of this stuff will be useful to you, but I also realise some of it contradicts a lot of classical methods. Many of these classical methods do work (sometimes for reasons we never thought about) and I always try to understand the why, as well as the how. Snakes are very unique in their habits, physiology and also their responses to various environmental conditions or stress factors. We can often make them do things nature never really intended and more often than not without negative consequence. The captive environment is not the wild. We cannot hope to even get close to replicating a wild environment, nor I think would our snakes thank us for attempting to do so. But they are still the same snakes and I find all aspects of keeping and breeding them fascinating.
Well that blows holes in my theory. Remember my video with rich some time ago on the 1000g wall or as i dubbed it “the dress rehearsal”. I came to suspect this was the case on the basis that i experienced it with coming of age females and not males. Perhaps this was because of my haste to get the weight on the female back when i knew much less about the problems this can cause. Your theory make more sense. I have this season had 2 females that fasted last year and have gone on to produce but now I’m thinking that this was because they had a chance to relax and and recuperate and less of a dress rehearsal. But at least i was thinking about what it meant and not just going along with what is prefer opinion of the masses. Such a fantastic brace of educational videos rob. Thanks for all the hard work👌🏼👏🏻
Hi Joe. Yes I remember the video and don't discard your theories too soon because there are always contributing factors. I think that if we start with the underlying physiology of a snake, the mechanism that actually allows them to do this, we're in good shape for looking at other things that might induce this fast. Feeding regimes is just one of them. Seasonal hormonal changes is another. This fasting is not restricted to just females. Males do it too, but by the time they do, they're already up to size and we don't care. Males and females can both do this at any time and often more than once in their lives, but they're already up to size so we don't care. Our focus is always directly on those 1200gm females that are coming up to first time breeding. Ball Pythons do not hibernate, but when it gets too hot to move around outside and prey is scarce, they do the tropical equivalent, which is estivation. They dial back all their vital functions and wait for better times. They are capable of doing this for a very long time. So to bring them out of it, think about what brings them out of it in the wild. We allow them a period of rest. We wait for a change in the weather outside (the start of the rainy season), we switch up something in their tubs and we scent the room with food, but don't necessarily offer food for a further week or two. The reason the 1000gm wall is often associated with breeding is because its these exact same changes that stimulate breeding and our snakes are in rooms full of other snakes all talking to each other via scent and pheromones. While everything else in the room is responding, our powerhouse project snake we have been pumping up with food for 2/3 years doesn't seem to notice and it's this situation that drives us nuts with frustration. Shock treatment might work to snap an estivating snake out of its fast. The old "put a male in trick", the "cooling" trick, any of the "traditional" shock methods....all methods designed to introduce a bit of stress and force our snakes to breed. It is indeed true that when a male finds a female, he doesn't ask her age and weight, but this isn't the wild. This is on us. It's our choice, not theirs. For mature females already a decent size, especially seasoned breeders, doing this is not going to harm them, but for a young 1200gm female, who is telling you she isn't quite ready yet, she most likely won't breed anyway, but if she does breed, or you force her to breed, you put her at greater risk by doing so.
Hi Marcus. Glad you enjoyed this. We should all be open to learning new stuff. I depend on the awesome comments of my subscribers to teach me new stuff and really add value through dicussion.
This is a great video Rob and certainly one I'm going to start doing. I do have a question about females that have laid a clutch of eggs tho. Do u still feed them every 2 weeks or do u increase there food intake until they get the prelaying weight?
Hi Sean. Females that have laid get a few weeks of once a week smaller meals to get them on the road to recovery, then onto the every two week regime. They dont really need much extra food to get them reconditioned and a good meal every 2 weeks is plenty. The beauty of this technique is it allows your snake to self regulate its metabolism and it becomes much more efficient utilising the less frequent meals. They are not actually getting less nutrition from fewer meals. You can monitor each individual snake and tailor its recovery plan to that individual snake. A bit extra wont hurt if you think they need it. Also if you food cycle your females before breeding them, they tend to end up in better condition than they might otherwise, so recovery is faster, quicker and easier.
Hi mate. Yes it is. There are cases where snakes will continue to eat right up to laying eggs. It isn't common, but some females do continue to eat. When she lays, a full digestive tract can restrict the free passage of eggs in the oviduct and invariably the muscular contractions associated with egg laying will force the poo out too and it will end up everywhere including all over the eggs. So when a female gets close and certainly before ovulation, I tend not to offer food any more. She doesn't need to eat at this stage so its better if she has an empty GI tract.
Excellent topic and very well explained. The information you offer makes total sense and will be switching my feeding schedule to what you've talked about. I always learn something in everyone of your videos. Thank you for offering your experience to us. Writing to you from Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
Hi mate. Small changes, tweaks to your existing techniques work best. Let your snakes be your guide. They will tell you when they like something or they don't. If you reduce your feeding intervals, I'm betting your snakes won't miss a beat, you'll get a better feeding response and best of all, less poop!
This is another informative video mate! I am feeding may newly acquired hatchling every five days, then weekly if they started to reach 800 grams. I am hoping that my breeder females will drop the pearly whites soon. I am still waiting for the belly pictures of the female asphalt/yb from the seller. More power and many more informative videos to come.
Hi Joseph. A regular commenter now. That's great. Much appreciated. Hope you get what you are looking for in the pictures. I will do a video short on my Asphalt as soon as he sheds. I'll paste a response to an earlier comment here because it fits well with your comment too. My new hatchlings are fed every 5 to 7 days until they get that robust healthy look after a few sheds then I drop them back to 7 days, but I don't freak out if they go 10 days to 2 weeks without eating. I tend to feed a decent sized prey item even to my smaller snakes and I have not noticed any difference in growth rate with any of these regimes. They grow at the rate they grow. The difference is purely in how much of the food comes out of the other end! Snakes fed less use the food they do eat more efficiently. I would add that supercharged metabolic rates in young snakes does encourage fast growth (and more poop) and doesn't seem to adversely effect them, at least initially. It's their job to get as big as possible as fast as possible. Every bit of size they can gain increases their chances of survival in the wild. But sooner or later, they start to take on the metabolic rate and feeding frequency or their larger counterparts and will hit a wall if they are overfed. They self regulate unlike humans!
My room changes a bit more here in Thailand. My room is on my 1st floor and ny desk is right near them, so I'm experiencing what they do all day. In summer it's 30-33°C, winter 20-26, rainy 22-31. My average temp is 27-30. My humidity varies too. 50-80%
Hi Samantha. This is close to what I get outside, but my room is buffered, so much more stable than outside. Summer daytime no issue as long as it doesn't go over 33C. Rainy spells get a bit cool, but this is short lived, so also no issue. Your winter nighttime temperatures are a bit cool if they drop to 20C. I think 26C would be OK but digestion is going to be difficult at 20C for prolonged periods. This is right when you need them to be eating for breeding as well. I would try a bit of buffering if you can just to protect your room from the extremes at either end, but the tropics is the tropics and its where these snakes live, so you won't know for sure until you try. I bet most of the time its absolutely fine, but I'd be wary when temps go over 31C and below 26C in the room for any length of time. A high temperature spike over 33C for even a short duration can potentially ruin your whole season. The ground floor tends to be a bit more stable, which is where my room is.
@@RobertBarracloughRoyalBalls As I am renting my home now, I can not do a lot. My snakes are on the 1st floor (2 story townhouse). So I have been using reptile heating pads and other things to keep the temps up at an okay temp for winter. Hopefully, I can buy a house soon and build a nice snake room that I can keep a stable temperature.
@@RobertBarracloughRoyalBalls In Ratchaburi, it's usually extremely hot, but the temperatures and seasons have been changing (climate change). Ratchaburi is near Bangkok and on the border of Thailand and Myanmar. The winter is usually just a few days here and there or a chilly week and then back to mid to upper 20's. I do need a jacket somedays and definitely in the morning.
Hi Samantha. I just got myself a nice piece of environmental monitoring kit for my snake room. Measures all the usual parameters - temps, max and min, humidity but also has barometric pressure and moon phase and a remote sensor out in my garden so I can get the same readings outdoors. For instance, yesterday was 37C outside mid afternoon, but inside was 29.5C. Last night, outside dropped to 28C but inside was still rock steady 29C. The barometer was 998/997 all day and humidity was nearly 80% outside (37C and 80% humidity - swelteringly hot and sticky!) and 65% inside. I can bring you guys some more accurate data now on what's going on in my snake room vs what's happening outside. I'm keen to get an idea of how barometric pressure varies and how it effects our snakes.
Hi Dakota. I rarely have issues with prolonged fasts specifically with young females, which is how I would define "the wall", but it can happen at any time, at any age, and with both sexes and the cure is always the same. Leave them alone and be patient. So all my snakes get offered food on schedule, but any that are not at the front of their tubs and ready to eat, or that hesitate, don't get fed that feeding day and will not be offered again until next feeding day, whatever the schedule might be. I spend no time at all trying to coax them or tease them into eating. Coaxing, teasing and offering too often can be counterproductive because it actually stresses them out. I will note a snake that hasn't eaten for a few weeks and there are many reasons this could be, but with a large collection its easier to rule out health issues, feeding protocols or husbandry problems if all your other snakes are eating. If it's an only snake or one of just a few, these are all things we should check, but it can be more difficult if we have had no experience of snakes not feeding and its our only snake. Invariably in this case the cause is us or something we are doing that the snake doesn't like. Fix that and the snake will eat. For snakes that have shut down and gone into "estivation" I just leave them alone. I don't even check them every day. They have not eaten so there is no poo to clean and I refresh the water bowl every few days. I note their size and body condition by eye and so monitor their weight loss (if any) by eye. Usually, sooner or later they will decide to eat again. You can try a complete tub refresh, change to a different slot in the rack or put them into a smaller tub if its been a few months, but generally they don't seem to loose any weight or condition and snap out of it when they're ready. Note this is different to snakes going off food when they are being bred. The reasons in this case are different and in most cases, reabsorption being the exception, females going off food is actually a good sign. So ultimately, patience is the solution. Minimal disturbance. Zero handling. No teasing or coaxing, but offer food on your usual schedule. And try not to panic or be impatient. Almost everything we do to try to help actually makes it worse.
I feed mine every 10-14 days not one has ever stopped eating at 1000g . Have paired 5 females and none have weighed over 1300g and only had two slugs out of 31 eggs. And ever one maternal incubates with 100% success and ever one of them eat 3 days after last baby had pipped 3 eat a small asf every 2-3 weeks.
I'm going to answer this one first because this is interesting. The devil is always in the detail and I'm fascinated by your success. Every 10 to 14 days feeding is I think a great regimen and probably contributes a lot to your snakes not hitting a wall. The 5 x 1300gm females is what really caught my attention. I do have some experience with smaller females, none of it particularly good, but so far no disasters or dead snakes for me personally. I had (still have) a 3 year old (now 5 years old) Pastel Enchi Clown female who is super nice. The mother of my Firefly Enchi Clown male you might have seen on Instagram or on this channel. Really keen to breed her for the first time back then, but she was always a really picky eater and took forever to get to 1500gms. I paired her up the moment she reached the "magic" weight. Her ravenous eating phase of the build consisted of her half heartedly eating maybe 2 or 3 rats and she topped out before laying at about 1800gms. She laid 6 good eggs, but after laying she was pitifully thin. Skin and bone. She weighed about 900 gms after giving up those 6 eggs. I honestly thought she would not make it, but she did. She did not however recover any weight and took forever to get back to 1500gms. In her second season, same thing, she gave me 4 eggs and again I thought she was going to die. I clearly hadn't learned much from my first experience, but I vowed never to subject a female to this again. This year, she suddenly turned into an eating machine and is eating really well. She has shot up in weight to over 2kg. Almost a different snake. I can't help but feel this is what I should have waited for in the first place. So here is my rational and my own experience. A small (young) female is obviously not as girthy as a larger female, but she is going to lay eggs about the same size as any female does, somewhere between about 85gms to 100gms per egg. They have to be this size because they need a minimum amount of nutrients to sustain the developing embryo through to hatching, so small snakes lay eggs the same size as a big snake, but usually fewer of them. Also because she is thinner and has less room inside, as her follicles grow they tend to restrict her digestive system sooner than in a larger snake. Typically a female will go off food 4 to 6 weeks before ovulation, with smaller snakes going off food sooner and larger snakes eating a bit longer as they can still squeeze in a bit of food past those developing follicles. This means that after ovulation, pre lay shed and the gravid period, a small snake will have been off food for 90+ days before laying. A larger snake only around 70 to 80 days. I don't maternally incubate, but add another 60 days on top of these numbers for incubation. So a small snake might not eat for 150 days, while a bigger snake goes without food for a shorter time. I think the hormonal changes associated with maternal incubation and the eggs hatching does encourage a female to eat immediately after the eggs hatch, so no issues there. Sometimes removing a female from eggs doesn't change her maternal instincts and she sometimes will not eat immediately. Post lay clean up protocols usually resolve this and females do get back on food. 5 females and 31 eggs is 6 egg clutches. This is a bit on the low side, but not alarmingly so. My average over the years is a bit under 8 eggs per clutch (7.7). This really isn't a telling statistic. The second clutch for a smaller female being bred again is the real indicator of how much laying eggs can really take out of a female. In my case, the female didn't recover well and her second clutch was even smaller. Slugs are not really an indication of the size of the female. She has still developed those follicles and the nutrients she has put into a slug is the same as for a fertile egg. She still has to do the work to produce slugs. Slugs are more a function of your temperatures, pairing schedules and other protocols rather than the size of the female and it looks like your protocols are spot on here. I'm keen to establish how old those 1300gm females were? 2 years or 3 years old? How long were you pairing them before they went on to lay eggs? Sometimes we can pair for a year before anything happens with younger females, so they are older and heavier before they actually start to build. The key weight that ensures their survival is the weight they manage to get to before they stop eating, not the weight they start at. So, I'm also interested in what their peak weight was during build and how much they weighed after they laid, or after they finished incubating? 6 eggs is going to be about 800 gms weight loss over the period the snake doesn't eat plus the eggs themselves, so these females must have gained a lot of weight fast during their build, or they would be very skinny after laying. Have they bred a second time and what was the result? All of these numbers would really help to get a handle on what you are doing differently and how your snakes are responding, compared to my own experience. I would add that I always worry about first time females regardless of size. Until they lay a trouble free clutch I think its natural to worry a bit. Over at ARP with 100 plus clutches every year, its always the smaller females that have problems. Sometimes they struggle to get eggs out and end up egg bound. Sometimes they tear up their insides and prolapse their oviducts, which is always fatal. Sometimes they end up so skinny that even if they survive laying the eggs, they don't recover and die a week or so later. I'm not suggesting this is a common thing in young snakes. It's actually very rare. More often than not, a young female who is not ready just doesn't go on to lay eggs, either not developing follicles or reabsorbing before ovulation. But I still feel the risk for a first time female is much increased if she is also small. A larger female might also be at risk if she is fat and has very enlarged fat glands which can also obstruct the oviduct and cause problems pushing those eggs out. This is why its also not advisable to pump up a female with power feeding, thinking she is going to get to size quicker and can be bred faster. This also increases the risk of issues. The real crunch for me was understanding that snakes do not respond to adverse conditions or stress in the same way mammals do. They will actually try to breed when a mammal would not. They will sacrifice themselves under these circumstances to give a clutch of eggs. This is what let's male snakes breed themselves to death. This is what allows a female to produce a clutch and then die. These are bad outcomes in our captive bred snakes, but wild snakes can and will do it. This is why putting a male in with a young female or cooling your room to temperatures not normally experienced in nature puts a bit of stress on your collection and can in fact encourage them to breed. It works, but for me at least, it works for the wrong reasons. Inducing stress runs the risk of overdoing it and ending up with seasonal RI's or other health issues. Sorry for the long post but I'm keen to add some detail to your comment and understand a bit more. It obviously works for you.
Wow, difficult question to answer. A decent sized rat every month is not too little food. Your snake will self regulate its metabolic rate and its growth based on food availability. I would not feed any more often than every 2 weeks and then it would be a smaller sized meal. But nor would I worry about going longer intervals for short periods or feeding spare unused rats more frequently for short periods. This is exactly the feeding regime a snake is designed for. It isn't designed for regular feedings every week.
@@RobertBarracloughRoyalBalls I figured it would be a difficult question especially being that snakes don't have a scudule feeding in the wild... I been feeding my adult males a small rat every 15 days but I might just bump it up to every 21 days. My goal is to have healthy snakes that will live as long as possible.
The males get fed less than the females, but yes, step up their food as well on the run up to breeding and then try to minimise stress on them so they keep eating right through. They usually do stay on food if you don't overuse them. It is the females and their receptiveness that encourages the males to breed. They can smell receptive females in the same room, so as long as your females are building, your males are eating, that aspect sort of takes care of itself.
Great advice Rob. I agree with your interpretation of the so called wall. It makes seance to rest them out of season. We have moved all our snakes on to once every two weeks including 300 to 400g grow ons. They eat a good sized multi and seem to be growing at the same rate as weekly feeders from the previous year. We save on cleaning time and our snakes are more relaxed. Feeding day is a lot quicker. I wish I had seen a video like this one 3 years ago.
Hi Paul. My new hatchlings are fed every 5 to 7 days until they get that robust healthy look after a few sheds then I drop them back to 7 days, but I don't freak out if they go 10 days to 2 weeks without eating. I tend to feed a decent sized prey item even to my smaller snakes and I have not noticed any difference in growth rate with any of these regimes. They grow at the rate they grow. The difference is purely in how much of the food comes out of the other end! Snakes fed less use the food they do eat more efficiently.
I would add that supercharged metabolic rates in young snakes does encourage fast growth (and more poop) and doesn't seem to adversely effect them, at least initially. It's their job to get as big as possible as fast as possible. Every bit of size they can gain increases their chances of survival in the wild. But sooner or later, they start to take on the metabolic rate and feeding frequency or their larger counterparts and will hit a wall if they are overfed. They self regulate unlike humans!
Not a breeder but it is nice to hear a breeder obeying natures clock and not their clock even though human nature sometimes or inexperience to wanna force things.
Thank you. I'm glad we have a wide audience here. I'm a firm believer that nature knows best, at least as far as a captive environment allows nature to work. We work with it rather than try to override it.
Excellent video! Thank you. It gives me much more information than anything else I've found so far.
Thanks Samantha. You can always message me and ask as well.
Great video, I have been keeping my snakes like this for the past 2 years after doing research into the subjects
Hi Wayne. And your snakes are thriving on this regime correct? Less poo. More efficient digestion. Cheaper food bills. What's not to like?
@@RobertBarracloughRoyalBalls my snakes look healthier than every
Always makes sense that's why you're the best. Thank you Mr. Barraclough
Thanks for the compliment. Take what you like and give it a try. Discard what you don't like. Whatever works for you is the best.
@@RobertBarracloughRoyalBalls Well, I'll take them all. :)
Rob... that section of the snake breeding behaviour 🤣 no perfume, etc oh dear lord I'm taking that and making the "ooh yeah baby" a ringtone for when you text me 🤣🤣🤣
The concept of the wall how you explained it made absoloute sense.
And I commented on the community page about not experiencing this phenomenon myself and now I also see why.
My feeding regime is basic and kind of inline with your breeding build up.
My hatchlings or really young snakes eat weekly.
As soon as they hit a bigger size perhaps 500-800g then they go for food every 2 weeks.
With the females I'm pairing they're now destroying food once a week and sometimes eat an offering that's been refused by another.
Without giving my method a title or a specific reason, I'd say its pretty much the same as you've explained .. but I've done this through trial and error, and ultimately listening to my snakes.
I've listened to weekly feeders, I've followed there advice and if it works for them... Good on em, I tried it, it didn't work for me, and in general I have no issues with refusals, cleaner tubs, and less expense all round.
There are the odd exception I admit, but if I have a picky feeder, it's because she is just that and has always been this way, I have explanations as to why ( self blame entirely) but as for the 1kg wall.. ive yet to experience that, if I do at all.
All the best mate and thanks for that seductive image of Rob being a girl for 30 seconds 👍
Oooooohhhh yeah baby!
I'm still waiting for comments from our lady breeders out there!
@@RobertBarracloughRoyalBalls lady snake breeders are like biker women.. hot and dangerous!
You are a wealth of knowledge! Great video and priceless valuable advices.
Hi mate. Thanks for the vote of confidence! As with all my videos, take the bits that you like and try them out. Disregard the bits that don't or wont work for you. We all have to find a way that works for us with our own setups in our own country with our own snakes.
Thanks Uncle ROB! From the UK ;)
Welcome mate. Hope you are well over there.
Cycling food makes more sense than temperature. In their natural habitat food, and perhaps barometric pressure would vary more than temperature. Love yor channel.
Thanks mate. Let me kick off the discussion by saying temperature cycles and introducing males early does seem to work in many cases. A quick fix or a "workaround" for the less patient. The reason I believe it works is by introducing a bit of stress to our snakes to encourage them to "breed to survive". Is it necessary to do this? No, almost certainly not, if we are a bit more patient. We also run the risk of pushing this stress too far. Our males go off food, our collections are susceptible to seasonal infections such as bacterial RI and we run the risk of killing the odd female from "forced" breeding when they are on a different schedule to the one that suits us.
The 1000gm wall can occur for many reasons if our husbandry or a myriad other factors are not on point. It can also happen at any time to any snake. The real reason its an issue is when it occurs in 1200gm females we are desperate to breed that season. If she breeds this time next year, rather than this year, why is that an issue? Surely the snake is more important? Can we use "stress" to override nature? Yes we can. Should we do it? I can't answer that question because the answer will be different for different people.
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Another great video Rob!! And so refreshing compared to so many other breeders who advocate pairing females far too early imo. It sounds like food cycling is a very ethical way to encourage females to be ready to breed at a time that is right for them whilst also giving their digestive system a rest.
Glad you enjoyed it Laura. Science usually has the edge over anecdotal or legacy breeding techniques and I hope this promotes a greater understanding of snake physiology.
Because much of snake behavior is obligate or instinctive, it is relatively easy to trick our snakes into breeding when they are not really physically prepared to do so and their physiology pretty much compels them to try. Nothing is more annoying as a scientist to hear a fellow breeder say snakes don't carry scales in the wild and they will breed when they are ready. Pure nonsense with no thought for snake biology.
@@RobertBarracloughRoyalBalls well yes. I think people use that statement as an excuse to breed females at lower weights than what is healthy. It is our responsibility to look after them as best we can and that includes not putting them under pressure to breed too early when they don’t have enough reserves for the process.
Amen brother! Thank you for sciencing it up for me! LOL! That’s not a word. After a decade of keeping and breeding ball pythons, these are the conclusions I’ve come to as well. We feed way too much! They are not built to eat every week. It’s too much!
Glad you enjoyed the video mate. You have been busy catching up!
Another great video with very great information Rob, your channel has been an amazing source of information and learning for me. I agree that we probably over feed our pythons/boa species. With my pythons and boas I feed them every 7 to 10 days for the first month or two I have them to make sure they are feeding well for me and then spread out their feedings to about every 14 days (sometimes more and sometime less) as well as feeding them smaller rather than larger meals. Pythons and boas are VERY efficient at making the most of each meal they get.
Hi Jacob. Thanks for watching and contributing. I'll repeat a reply to a previous comment because it fits here as well.
My new hatchlings are fed every 5 to 7 days until they get that robust healthy look after a few sheds then I drop them back to 7 days, but I don't freak out if they go 10 days to 2 weeks without eating. I tend to feed a decent sized prey item even to my smaller snakes and I have not noticed any difference in growth rate with any of these regimes. They grow at the rate they grow. The difference is purely in how much of the food comes out of the other end! Snakes fed less use the food they do eat more efficiently.
I would add that supercharged metabolic rates in young snakes does encourage fast growth (and more poop) and doesn't seem to adversely effect them, at least initially. It's their job to get as big as possible as fast as possible. Every bit of size they can gain increases their chances of survival in the wild. But sooner or later, they start to take on the metabolic rate and feeding frequency or their larger counterparts and will hit a wall if they are overfed. They self regulate unlike humans!
Great video Rob. Love this detailed explanation of your food cycling in preparation for breeding and particularly interested in your thoughts on the 1000g wall. I’ve heard many ideas on the wall but never this one although it makes perfect sense with the “afterburners” having burnt out and needing a break. What I have learned to do is not worry about a snake not eating. I guess like most new keepers I used to really worry if a snake missed 2 or 3 feeds on the trot but now I don’t think about it much at all. I have for example a leopard pied girl who was a very aggressive feeder and went from 245g when o got her in March 2021 to 1347g almost a year to the day later at which stage she went of food and did nothing but sit under her hide for the next 4 1/2 months. She wasn’t interested in food in the slightest. That would have scared me to death initially but it didn’t phase me and often I wouldn’t even bother to offer her food as she would stay under her hide while the room was scented and clearly had no interest in it. Then at the end of July with no warning she came out and took up something of an ambush position so I offered her food at the next feeding which she showed some interest in but didn’t take however the following feed she took a rat and 6 weeks later is pounding food. Interestingly during that 4 1/2 month fast she only lost about 80g so as you say clearly had plenty of reserves and she has put on all than and more in 6 weeks as she prepares for her first breeding season. I’ll be putting the pastel clown 66% het pied male to her to hopefully prove him out and if not to produce some leopard double hets so just got to hope that she’s done what she needed to do in order to be ready to give us a nice clutch.
Fantastic video mate!
Thanks Ed. I don't want to normalise not eating, but the fact is our snakes are physiologically designed not to eat for extended periods, so we shouldn't really be surprised when they exercise this ability. As long as your snake is healthy and has good parameters, so you know it's not you or something you did, they will do this from time to time with no ill effects. In fact I think they actually need to do this from time to time.
For a new keeper or someone with only one snake (so nothing to compare it to) it can be stressful.
Rather than fight it, I have actually incorporated food cycling into my normal regime and find it actually works very well.
@@RobertBarracloughRoyalBalls and it’s obviously working very well for you which means it must sit well with your snakes as well. Great advice!
Another great and informative video Rob!
Hi Carl. I know some of this stuff will be useful to you, but I also realise some of it contradicts a lot of classical methods. Many of these classical methods do work (sometimes for reasons we never thought about) and I always try to understand the why, as well as the how. Snakes are very unique in their habits, physiology and also their responses to various environmental conditions or stress factors. We can often make them do things nature never really intended and more often than not without negative consequence. The captive environment is not the wild. We cannot hope to even get close to replicating a wild environment, nor I think would our snakes thank us for attempting to do so. But they are still the same snakes and I find all aspects of keeping and breeding them fascinating.
Well that blows holes in my theory. Remember my video with rich some time ago on the 1000g wall or as i dubbed it “the dress rehearsal”. I came to suspect this was the case on the basis that i experienced it with coming of age females and not males. Perhaps this was because of my haste to get the weight on the female back when i knew much less about the problems this can cause. Your theory make more sense. I have this season had 2 females that fasted last year and have gone on to produce but now I’m thinking that this was because they had a chance to relax and and recuperate and less of a dress rehearsal. But at least i was thinking about what it meant and not just going along with what is prefer opinion of the masses. Such a fantastic brace of educational videos rob. Thanks for all the hard work👌🏼👏🏻
Hi Joe. Yes I remember the video and don't discard your theories too soon because there are always contributing factors. I think that if we start with the underlying physiology of a snake, the mechanism that actually allows them to do this, we're in good shape for looking at other things that might induce this fast. Feeding regimes is just one of them. Seasonal hormonal changes is another.
This fasting is not restricted to just females. Males do it too, but by the time they do, they're already up to size and we don't care. Males and females can both do this at any time and often more than once in their lives, but they're already up to size so we don't care. Our focus is always directly on those 1200gm females that are coming up to first time breeding.
Ball Pythons do not hibernate, but when it gets too hot to move around outside and prey is scarce, they do the tropical equivalent, which is estivation. They dial back all their vital functions and wait for better times. They are capable of doing this for a very long time. So to bring them out of it, think about what brings them out of it in the wild. We allow them a period of rest. We wait for a change in the weather outside (the start of the rainy season), we switch up something in their tubs and we scent the room with food, but don't necessarily offer food for a further week or two.
The reason the 1000gm wall is often associated with breeding is because its these exact same changes that stimulate breeding and our snakes are in rooms full of other snakes all talking to each other via scent and pheromones. While everything else in the room is responding, our powerhouse project snake we have been pumping up with food for 2/3 years doesn't seem to notice and it's this situation that drives us nuts with frustration.
Shock treatment might work to snap an estivating snake out of its fast. The old "put a male in trick", the "cooling" trick, any of the "traditional" shock methods....all methods designed to introduce a bit of stress and force our snakes to breed. It is indeed true that when a male finds a female, he doesn't ask her age and weight, but this isn't the wild. This is on us. It's our choice, not theirs. For mature females already a decent size, especially seasoned breeders, doing this is not going to harm them, but for a young 1200gm female, who is telling you she isn't quite ready yet, she most likely won't breed anyway, but if she does breed, or you force her to breed, you put her at greater risk by doing so.
thanks yet again Sir , cheers
Thanks John. Always appreciate a comment from you!
Great information, always open to learn something knew - thank you.
Hi Marcus. Glad you enjoyed this. We should all be open to learning new stuff. I depend on the awesome comments of my subscribers to teach me new stuff and really add value through dicussion.
Awesome information
Thank you Pau Pau Pythons. Much appreciate the comment and hope you continue to watch and comment. It makes these videos worthwhile.
thankyou sir very great explanation
Thank you for watching and taking time to comment.
May I ask about what rat size you give to your female adult? @@RobertBarracloughRoyalBalls
Great video. A real thinker. 👍
Thanks mate. Glad you enjoyed it.
Awesome video and amazing snakes as always Rob 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
Thank you Patrick.
This is a great video Rob and certainly one I'm going to start doing. I do have a question about females that have laid a clutch of eggs tho. Do u still feed them every 2 weeks or do u increase there food intake until they get the prelaying weight?
Hi Sean. Females that have laid get a few weeks of once a week smaller meals to get them on the road to recovery, then onto the every two week regime. They dont really need much extra food to get them reconditioned and a good meal every 2 weeks is plenty. The beauty of this technique is it allows your snake to self regulate its metabolism and it becomes much more efficient utilising the less frequent meals. They are not actually getting less nutrition from fewer meals. You can monitor each individual snake and tailor its recovery plan to that individual snake. A bit extra wont hurt if you think they need it. Also if you food cycle your females before breeding them, they tend to end up in better condition than they might otherwise, so recovery is faster, quicker and easier.
@@RobertBarracloughRoyalBalls brilliant thank you
Great video! Could be possible for a female take a food after a prelay shed?
Hi mate. Yes it is. There are cases where snakes will continue to eat right up to laying eggs. It isn't common, but some females do continue to eat.
When she lays, a full digestive tract can restrict the free passage of eggs in the oviduct and invariably the muscular contractions associated with egg laying will force the poo out too and it will end up everywhere including all over the eggs.
So when a female gets close and certainly before ovulation, I tend not to offer food any more. She doesn't need to eat at this stage so its better if she has an empty GI tract.
Excellent topic and very well explained. The information you offer makes total sense and will be switching my feeding schedule to what you've talked about. I always learn something in everyone of your videos. Thank you for offering your experience to us. Writing to you from Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
Hi mate. Small changes, tweaks to your existing techniques work best. Let your snakes be your guide. They will tell you when they like something or they don't. If you reduce your feeding intervals, I'm betting your snakes won't miss a beat, you'll get a better feeding response and best of all, less poop!
This is another informative video mate!
I am feeding may newly acquired hatchling every five days, then weekly if they started to reach 800 grams. I am hoping that my breeder females will drop the pearly whites soon. I am still waiting for the belly pictures of the female asphalt/yb from the seller. More power and many more informative videos to come.
Hi Joseph. A regular commenter now. That's great. Much appreciated. Hope you get what you are looking for in the pictures. I will do a video short on my Asphalt as soon as he sheds.
I'll paste a response to an earlier comment here because it fits well with your comment too.
My new hatchlings are fed every 5 to 7 days until they get that robust healthy look after a few sheds then I drop them back to 7 days, but I don't freak out if they go 10 days to 2 weeks without eating. I tend to feed a decent sized prey item even to my smaller snakes and I have not noticed any difference in growth rate with any of these regimes. They grow at the rate they grow. The difference is purely in how much of the food comes out of the other end! Snakes fed less use the food they do eat more efficiently.
I would add that supercharged metabolic rates in young snakes does encourage fast growth (and more poop) and doesn't seem to adversely effect them, at least initially. It's their job to get as big as possible as fast as possible. Every bit of size they can gain increases their chances of survival in the wild. But sooner or later, they start to take on the metabolic rate and feeding frequency or their larger counterparts and will hit a wall if they are overfed. They self regulate unlike humans!
My room changes a bit more here in Thailand. My room is on my 1st floor and ny desk is right near them, so I'm experiencing what they do all day. In summer it's 30-33°C, winter 20-26, rainy 22-31. My average temp is 27-30. My humidity varies too. 50-80%
Hi Samantha. This is close to what I get outside, but my room is buffered, so much more stable than outside. Summer daytime no issue as long as it doesn't go over 33C. Rainy spells get a bit cool, but this is short lived, so also no issue. Your winter nighttime temperatures are a bit cool if they drop to 20C. I think 26C would be OK but digestion is going to be difficult at 20C for prolonged periods. This is right when you need them to be eating for breeding as well. I would try a bit of buffering if you can just to protect your room from the extremes at either end, but the tropics is the tropics and its where these snakes live, so you won't know for sure until you try. I bet most of the time its absolutely fine, but I'd be wary when temps go over 31C and below 26C in the room for any length of time. A high temperature spike over 33C for even a short duration can potentially ruin your whole season. The ground floor tends to be a bit more stable, which is where my room is.
@@RobertBarracloughRoyalBalls As I am renting my home now, I can not do a lot. My snakes are on the 1st floor (2 story townhouse). So I have been using reptile heating pads and other things to keep the temps up at an okay temp for winter. Hopefully, I can buy a house soon and build a nice snake room that I can keep a stable temperature.
@@sammythai99 where in Thailand are you based? Those winter temps are chilly! Need a jacket to keep warm!
@@RobertBarracloughRoyalBalls In Ratchaburi, it's usually extremely hot, but the temperatures and seasons have been changing (climate change). Ratchaburi is near Bangkok and on the border of Thailand and Myanmar. The winter is usually just a few days here and there or a chilly week and then back to mid to upper 20's. I do need a jacket somedays and definitely in the morning.
Hi Samantha. I just got myself a nice piece of environmental monitoring kit for my snake room. Measures all the usual parameters - temps, max and min, humidity but also has barometric pressure and moon phase and a remote sensor out in my garden so I can get the same readings outdoors. For instance, yesterday was 37C outside mid afternoon, but inside was 29.5C. Last night, outside dropped to 28C but inside was still rock steady 29C. The barometer was 998/997 all day and humidity was nearly 80% outside (37C and 80% humidity - swelteringly hot and sticky!) and 65% inside. I can bring you guys some more accurate data now on what's going on in my snake room vs what's happening outside. I'm keen to get an idea of how barometric pressure varies and how it effects our snakes.
When your girls hit the wall and go off food do you still offer food occasionally? If so, how often
Hi Dakota. I rarely have issues with prolonged fasts specifically with young females, which is how I would define "the wall", but it can happen at any time, at any age, and with both sexes and the cure is always the same. Leave them alone and be patient. So all my snakes get offered food on schedule, but any that are not at the front of their tubs and ready to eat, or that hesitate, don't get fed that feeding day and will not be offered again until next feeding day, whatever the schedule might be. I spend no time at all trying to coax them or tease them into eating. Coaxing, teasing and offering too often can be counterproductive because it actually stresses them out.
I will note a snake that hasn't eaten for a few weeks and there are many reasons this could be, but with a large collection its easier to rule out health issues, feeding protocols or husbandry problems if all your other snakes are eating. If it's an only snake or one of just a few, these are all things we should check, but it can be more difficult if we have had no experience of snakes not feeding and its our only snake. Invariably in this case the cause is us or something we are doing that the snake doesn't like. Fix that and the snake will eat.
For snakes that have shut down and gone into "estivation" I just leave them alone. I don't even check them every day. They have not eaten so there is no poo to clean and I refresh the water bowl every few days. I note their size and body condition by eye and so monitor their weight loss (if any) by eye. Usually, sooner or later they will decide to eat again. You can try a complete tub refresh, change to a different slot in the rack or put them into a smaller tub if its been a few months, but generally they don't seem to loose any weight or condition and snap out of it when they're ready.
Note this is different to snakes going off food when they are being bred. The reasons in this case are different and in most cases, reabsorption being the exception, females going off food is actually a good sign.
So ultimately, patience is the solution. Minimal disturbance. Zero handling. No teasing or coaxing, but offer food on your usual schedule. And try not to panic or be impatient. Almost everything we do to try to help actually makes it worse.
I feed mine every 10-14 days not one has ever stopped eating at 1000g . Have paired 5 females and none have weighed over 1300g and only had two slugs out of 31 eggs. And ever one maternal incubates with 100% success and ever one of them eat 3 days after last baby had pipped 3 eat a small asf every 2-3 weeks.
I'm going to answer this one first because this is interesting. The devil is always in the detail and I'm fascinated by your success.
Every 10 to 14 days feeding is I think a great regimen and probably contributes a lot to your snakes not hitting a wall.
The 5 x 1300gm females is what really caught my attention. I do have some experience with smaller females, none of it particularly good, but so far no disasters or dead snakes for me personally. I had (still have) a 3 year old (now 5 years old) Pastel Enchi Clown female who is super nice. The mother of my Firefly Enchi Clown male you might have seen on Instagram or on this channel. Really keen to breed her for the first time back then, but she was always a really picky eater and took forever to get to 1500gms.
I paired her up the moment she reached the "magic" weight. Her ravenous eating phase of the build consisted of her half heartedly eating maybe 2 or 3 rats and she topped out before laying at about 1800gms. She laid 6 good eggs, but after laying she was pitifully thin. Skin and bone. She weighed about 900 gms after giving up those 6 eggs. I honestly thought she would not make it, but she did. She did not however recover any weight and took forever to get back to 1500gms. In her second season, same thing, she gave me 4 eggs and again I thought she was going to die. I clearly hadn't learned much from my first experience, but I vowed never to subject a female to this again.
This year, she suddenly turned into an eating machine and is eating really well. She has shot up in weight to over 2kg. Almost a different snake. I can't help but feel this is what I should have waited for in the first place.
So here is my rational and my own experience. A small (young) female is obviously not as girthy as a larger female, but she is going to lay eggs about the same size as any female does, somewhere between about 85gms to 100gms per egg. They have to be this size because they need a minimum amount of nutrients to sustain the developing embryo through to hatching, so small snakes lay eggs the same size as a big snake, but usually fewer of them. Also because she is thinner and has less room inside, as her follicles grow they tend to restrict her digestive system sooner than in a larger snake. Typically a female will go off food 4 to 6 weeks before ovulation, with smaller snakes going off food sooner and larger snakes eating a bit longer as they can still squeeze in a bit of food past those developing follicles.
This means that after ovulation, pre lay shed and the gravid period, a small snake will have been off food for 90+ days before laying. A larger snake only around 70 to 80 days. I don't maternally incubate, but add another 60 days on top of these numbers for incubation. So a small snake might not eat for 150 days, while a bigger snake goes without food for a shorter time.
I think the hormonal changes associated with maternal incubation and the eggs hatching does encourage a female to eat immediately after the eggs hatch, so no issues there. Sometimes removing a female from eggs doesn't change her maternal instincts and she sometimes will not eat immediately. Post lay clean up protocols usually resolve this and females do get back on food.
5 females and 31 eggs is 6 egg clutches. This is a bit on the low side, but not alarmingly so. My average over the years is a bit under 8 eggs per clutch (7.7). This really isn't a telling statistic. The second clutch for a smaller female being bred again is the real indicator of how much laying eggs can really take out of a female. In my case, the female didn't recover well and her second clutch was even smaller. Slugs are not really an indication of the size of the female. She has still developed those follicles and the nutrients she has put into a slug is the same as for a fertile egg. She still has to do the work to produce slugs. Slugs are more a function of your temperatures, pairing schedules and other protocols rather than the size of the female and it looks like your protocols are spot on here.
I'm keen to establish how old those 1300gm females were? 2 years or 3 years old? How long were you pairing them before they went on to lay eggs? Sometimes we can pair for a year before anything happens with younger females, so they are older and heavier before they actually start to build. The key weight that ensures their survival is the weight they manage to get to before they stop eating, not the weight they start at. So, I'm also interested in what their peak weight was during build and how much they weighed after they laid, or after they finished incubating? 6 eggs is going to be about 800 gms weight loss over the period the snake doesn't eat plus the eggs themselves, so these females must have gained a lot of weight fast during their build, or they would be very skinny after laying. Have they bred a second time and what was the result? All of these numbers would really help to get a handle on what you are doing differently and how your snakes are responding, compared to my own experience.
I would add that I always worry about first time females regardless of size. Until they lay a trouble free clutch I think its natural to worry a bit. Over at ARP with 100 plus clutches every year, its always the smaller females that have problems. Sometimes they struggle to get eggs out and end up egg bound. Sometimes they tear up their insides and prolapse their oviducts, which is always fatal. Sometimes they end up so skinny that even if they survive laying the eggs, they don't recover and die a week or so later. I'm not suggesting this is a common thing in young snakes. It's actually very rare. More often than not, a young female who is not ready just doesn't go on to lay eggs, either not developing follicles or reabsorbing before ovulation. But I still feel the risk for a first time female is much increased if she is also small. A larger female might also be at risk if she is fat and has very enlarged fat glands which can also obstruct the oviduct and cause problems pushing those eggs out. This is why its also not advisable to pump up a female with power feeding, thinking she is going to get to size quicker and can be bred faster. This also increases the risk of issues.
The real crunch for me was understanding that snakes do not respond to adverse conditions or stress in the same way mammals do. They will actually try to breed when a mammal would not. They will sacrifice themselves under these circumstances to give a clutch of eggs. This is what let's male snakes breed themselves to death. This is what allows a female to produce a clutch and then die. These are bad outcomes in our captive bred snakes, but wild snakes can and will do it.
This is why putting a male in with a young female or cooling your room to temperatures not normally experienced in nature puts a bit of stress on your collection and can in fact encourage them to breed. It works, but for me at least, it works for the wrong reasons. Inducing stress runs the risk of overdoing it and ending up with seasonal RI's or other health issues.
Sorry for the long post but I'm keen to add some detail to your comment and understand a bit more. It obviously works for you.
How often should I feed a adult male who I have no plans on ever breeding?
Wow, difficult question to answer. A decent sized rat every month is not too little food. Your snake will self regulate its metabolic rate and its growth based on food availability. I would not feed any more often than every 2 weeks and then it would be a smaller sized meal. But nor would I worry about going longer intervals for short periods or feeding spare unused rats more frequently for short periods. This is exactly the feeding regime a snake is designed for. It isn't designed for regular feedings every week.
@@RobertBarracloughRoyalBalls I figured it would be a difficult question especially being that snakes don't have a scudule feeding in the wild... I been feeding my adult males a small rat every 15 days but I might just bump it up to every 21 days. My goal is to have healthy snakes that will live as long as possible.
@@beachaddict7653 your regime sounds fine. Dont overthink it. Keep it simple. Mix it up a bit. Sometimes more sometimes less.
Do you food cycle your breeder males the same way you do your females?
The males get fed less than the females, but yes, step up their food as well on the run up to breeding and then try to minimise stress on them so they keep eating right through. They usually do stay on food if you don't overuse them.
It is the females and their receptiveness that encourages the males to breed. They can smell receptive females in the same room, so as long as your females are building, your males are eating, that aspect sort of takes care of itself.