Please help if you can :)

Hi, im doing a dissertation for my degree on the growth rates of male and female cornsnakes. Im trying to see if male or female corns grow faster or not or whether they grow the same. However i cannot house a large enough population in my flat, (i have 2 corns) sooooo i was wondering if people could give me some of their records on their snakes, weights and lengths from young to adult?

This would really help me if you could spare a little of your time to email this to me [email protected].

Thankyou so much for looking xxxx

The problem is it's not sex usually...it's amount of food. Size and number of times feeding is key. You would need someone to weight each rodent before feeding to get accurate results. For example I ordered a pack of rat pups that I feed to my snakes for about a year...but the pups ranged widely in size from closer to a fuzzy to darn near a weanling.
Just a thought to keep in mind.
You are welcome to look at the weights and feedings Lauren and I have recorded on our iherp page. http://www.iherp.com/MasonDixonReptiles/

Tara's right; you will need to know the details of the owner's feeding regime and as no two keepers have the same routine, it might be difficult to directly compare growth rates - you could end up having to average. Power-fed (i.e. fed more often or larger food items than required for a "normal" growth rate) will be significantly larger than non-power-fed Corns of the same age. This will apply to males and females alike.

You also need to take into account whether females have bred or not. Forming and laying eggs will cause significant weight fluctuations throughout the year - you will need to know at what point in the annual cycle they were weighed, and factor that into your conclusions.

Females that have not bred will not have this drain on their physical resources and will thus have a steady bodyweight.

I'm afraid I don't record the sort of information you need. It's possible that you might find it difficult to locate a large enough amount of comparable data, but I wish you luck.

I keep pretty detailed records on my snakes...if you PM me your email address I can send you what "data" I have collected. I only have 8 snakes, but I would guess every little bit will help.

i wish i could help in length wise but i never measure length. i weigh each rodent before feeding it, and i also weigh the snake before each feeding. but my scale has been broken for a month now and i have only been doing it like this the past year. so its not exactly what your looking for. i would say possibly go off of weight to do your report. a lot of breeders keep accurate records of prey size and snake weight. they might not weigh the rodent. but find out where they order from. and get their rough estimate of size and include that. this is a pretty hard one to do as you would need a large number of animals and very accurate record keeping with all the animals on strict schedule and strict habitat variances.

Sorry - have just thought of another potential complication for your study.

Growth rates can be linked to genetics as well as feeding. Some Corns are smaller than others and grow at a slower rate, because that's a trait of the bloodline from which they originate. For example, I have a five year old female that is only about three and a half feet long. However, she is fully-grown - I've seen her parents and they were the same size. She's on exactly the same feeding regime as my other females, but just hasn't grown to the same size in the same period of time.

this is giving me a lot to think about.. and lots of variables to discuss. This in itself is very helpful!

Thankyou all so much for all your info

xx

Aside from what everyone else has said...

Pythons and boas generally DO show a difference in size due to sex. With BCI boas, for example, females can get as large as 9-12 feet but males average 6-9 (or something like that. I may be a bit off)... If you're determined to do growth rate differences by sex, you can try it with boas or pythons.

Thanks everyone, i think it will now be easier to go with the weights of food per week then the change in wieght as this seems to be what people suggest