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Just wondering... Baby rats

wildcat

wildcat

South african right here
Hi all.
I've been having a problem with a stray cat coming in a stealing my mice. Sorted that problem, but only after he made off with 36 of my 40 in one evening. Sneaky devil cat.
But I do have rats, and they breed like wildfire, so instead of getting more mice, I've been feeding them rat pups. I actually only found out now that they are super high in fat, which would explain why my boys are fattys and why my female is looking lovely after a double clutch :)
anyway, my question was whether the rat pups have enough calcium for the snakes? I'm thinking that a full grown mouse has stronger bones therefore better calcium?
Have gotten new mice this week as well... Just waiting on them to get busy now, got little mouths (just hatched) to feed soon :)
thanx. Interested to hear your advice :)
 
Rodentpro's website has an article entitled "Nutrient Composition of Whole Vertebrate Prey."
http://rodentpro.com/qpage_articles_03.asp

You can see that adult mice have 55.8% protein, 23.6% fat, and 2.98% calcium. Neonatal rats have 57.9% protein, 23.7% fat, and 1.85% calcium. As you guessed, there is a significant difference in the calcium content. Rat pups might count as juveniles, not neonatal, but that only has 2.07% calcium, so it is not all that much higher. Even adults rats are lower in calcium than adult mice, at 2.63%.

However, as far as I am aware, there have been no scientific studies on the nutritional requirements of corn snakes. So whether that higher calcium is good, bad, or just doesn't matter, we don't know. I do know that lots of captive corn snakes are kept on a diet of mice for their entire lives, just changing the size/age of the mice as the snake grows, and they seem to do just fine on it. I suspect there are also people out there who feed their adult corns rats, and have success with that as well, I just can't say so with certainty. Maybe someone who does that will chime in.

My guess, and this is only a guess, is that your snakes will be just fine on a diet of rat pups. It might be a little hard on the females when they produce eggs, but I'm not even sure if snake egg shells require as much calcium as chicken eggs shells do (that might be why they are soft instead of hard), so it might not matter.
 
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