Feeding schedule problems.

The following was related in the CornSnakes.com forum in reply to a question about why some snakes from people are smaller than others of a similar age.

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I just played around with my spreadsheet of figures from hatching last year (2002), showing the number of hatchlings per day I got. I then figured that if I wanted to feed them on a five day schedule, how many babies would I have when each feeding day rolled around:

July 10 - 204
July 15 - 610
July 20 - 1348
July 25 - 2500
July 30 - 3140
August 4 - 3703
August 9 - 4042

Of course, this is assuming I am ONLY feeding on 1 day of the week, which just can't happen with those numbers. So what it means is that we are feeding EVERY night as many babies as we can just to try to keep up. Remember all the while, babies are hatching out and need to be set up in their deli cups. Then each and every one offered food the night before has to be checked to see if the pinky was eaten or not.

Luckily animals are being shipped out to help reduce the numbers, but this takes it's toll on time as well. SOMEONE has to take those orders pick out the snakes, and pack the boxes. And that is all time that is pulled away from cleaning cages and feeding snakes, so it's not like it is free time found lurking in a corner somewhere. Unfortunately, the world doesn't stop throwing all of the little time vampires at you just because you are busy with baby snakes.

Even with the best of intentions, sometimes the work load just gets too much and we (my wife helps me out tremendously) just can't keep up the pace. So sometimes the feeding schedule will fall back to 6 days.

So let's assume we are busting our butts, keeping up with the 5 day schedule, when *WHAMO*! Expo weekend is next weekend (mid August). That means HUNDREDS of snakes have to be sexed and labeled for the show. We begin packing on Wednesday, which means very little time is left for feeding Wednesday and Thursday. Friday we are driving to the show for setup. And, of course, Saturday and Sunday we are doing the show, getting back home normally around midnight on Sunday night. Several hours are then spent checking on a bunch of egg incubating boxes making sure they are OK and they haven't filled up the water dishes that we put in with them before left for the show with vermiculite or draped the paper towel in it. That normally takes an hour or two, and we are pretty much wiped out by then. I also need to remove all of the spend eggs at this time, because to do otherwise invites a nasty bug problem in very short order.

So it isn't until Monday before the feeding schedule can resume, and even then, it is after putting back all of the animals that didn't sell, so they are in the proper feeding sequence. So right off the bat, the 5 day feeding schedule has been shot all to hell. Even at best case, the snakes that will be fed on Monday will have gone 9 days since the last feeding. But really, most of them will be on 10 or 11 days, because at this point, there are a MESS of baby corn snakes here.

This same exact scenario is played out for each and every show we do, except a few of the shows are much further away from us than Daytona Beach is, and we may be taken out of the feeding loop even more days than the example posted above. For the Mid-Atlantic Show, for instance, we are driving up there on Thursday and Friday, and don't get back home until very late Monday night. So we start packing on Tuesday for the show. That means an easy 7 days that is chopped right out of the feeding schedule.

I don't like it either, but from mid August thru November there are going to be stretches where the baby snakes may go 10 to 12 days between meals. This DEFINITELY affects the growth rate, no two ways about it. But there is absolutely nothing that can be done about it. One year I had a part time worker come in and supposedly keep up with feeding the baby snakes, but the number of hours he said he worked and the number of babies that actually got fed just didn't jive, so I dropped that program.

So that's it in a nutshell. I suspect that any other breeders that deal with large numbers of hatchlings and do shows hit up against the same brick wall as we do. Yes, I would like to feed my snakes every 5 days, but it just can't happen that way. And God help us if we decide to take a day or two off to try to preserve our sanity. I have seen it time and time again where taking one day off will put us three days behind schedule.

And just for the record, ALL of the babies, keepers and ones for sale alike, are fed exactly the same. They are kept together in the same racks and fed exactly on the same schedule. The baskets of deli cups will have keepers and animals for sale side by side, and there is absolutely no difference in how they are fed.

I hope this gives a bit of a bird's eye view of what goes on around here with the hatching season. And perhaps answers somewhat the question originally posed here. Babies that are fed periodically on a 10 day schedule are NOT going to grow as quickly as ones that are religiously fed twice a week. Matter of fact, I have seen many instances of where babies that hatch out LATER in the season can be bigger than ones that hatched out at the beginning of the season. If their feeding schedule just happens to fit into the show schedule where they are fed optimally (or as close to it as can be reasonably expected) it will make a substantial difference on how quickly they will grow.

Also, some animals can just handle larger meals than others, and these seem to reach a critical mass where they just begin growing quickly. However, on the other hand, smaller babies may have real trouble surviving the wide gaps in feeding schedules and even though they ARE eating, the schedule is such that they just cannot thrive. Any corn snake that is fed only every 12 days will probably die, even though it feeds every time it is offered food.

I guess I could add a lot more here, but dang, it's 4 am and I did have some other things I wanted to do before I hit the sack.

Anyway, I hope this helped somewhat. Unless you are actually doing this in the quantities we are working with, it's probably a bit difficult to comprehend the workload it involves.