When I first began researching snakes as pets I became curious about how an animal could grow from 4g to 300g+ in less than two years when they only ate approximately once a week. So, I decided to record the weight of each of my snakes and the the weight of every meal that they ate. I decided to not attempt to weigh each bowel movement or to attempt to weigh how much they drank. I have been generally following the Munson Plan. Now, about 5 months into my experiment I'm comfortable with the amount of data I've collected to share some of what I've found. For my 7 snakes they average a 33% retention rate. This means that for every mouse they eat, they convert 1/3 of its mass into body weight. No wonder they spend all day sleeping! If anyone wants to see all of my data I would be glad to share.
I plan to continue collecting data on each of these snakes throughout the rest of their lives and will give an update periodically on if any interesting information presents itself.
With this year's hatchlings I plan to take a slightly different angle and play with their diet a bit to see what sort of effect that has on growth rate and retention. I plan to keep two babies from each of the two breedings I am doing for future projects. Two will follow the Munson plan as all of my snakes have done so far. And two will be upgraded to larger mice as soon as it is healthy to do so. Both groups will be fed the same amount relative to their body weight. I want to see what sort of effect the size of prey has on retention. If anyone has any recommendations for how to approach please share your ideas.
Alright, now that I'm done geeking out about the project here is a simplified table of my data. Please note that there are numerical errors in retention in the table below which are due to rounding errors in Excel. The computed retention value below does not exactly equal the Total Weight Gain / Total Consumption values because I directly imported the retention value from each snake's record to preserve as much accuracy as possible.
If anyone else is doing a project like this I'd love to discuss your techniques!
Snake Total Consumption(g) Weight Gain(g) Retention
Alcyon 97.8 28.1 33%
Callisto 212.9 73.2 42%
Cetus 258.6 80.4 34%
Iskerika 62.9 20.9 31%
Merope 94.4 23.7 23%
Pleione 126 42.9 34%
Seif 141.7 48.1 34%
Average Retention = 33%
I plan to continue collecting data on each of these snakes throughout the rest of their lives and will give an update periodically on if any interesting information presents itself.
With this year's hatchlings I plan to take a slightly different angle and play with their diet a bit to see what sort of effect that has on growth rate and retention. I plan to keep two babies from each of the two breedings I am doing for future projects. Two will follow the Munson plan as all of my snakes have done so far. And two will be upgraded to larger mice as soon as it is healthy to do so. Both groups will be fed the same amount relative to their body weight. I want to see what sort of effect the size of prey has on retention. If anyone has any recommendations for how to approach please share your ideas.
Alright, now that I'm done geeking out about the project here is a simplified table of my data. Please note that there are numerical errors in retention in the table below which are due to rounding errors in Excel. The computed retention value below does not exactly equal the Total Weight Gain / Total Consumption values because I directly imported the retention value from each snake's record to preserve as much accuracy as possible.
If anyone else is doing a project like this I'd love to discuss your techniques!
Snake Total Consumption(g) Weight Gain(g) Retention
Alcyon 97.8 28.1 33%
Callisto 212.9 73.2 42%
Cetus 258.6 80.4 34%
Iskerika 62.9 20.9 31%
Merope 94.4 23.7 23%
Pleione 126 42.9 34%
Seif 141.7 48.1 34%
Average Retention = 33%
I look forward to seeing the results