Children's Python – nutrition and water
Water
Children’s pythons must be supplied with clean drinking water at all times. Water should be provided in a shallow dish that is large enough for the snake to curl up in and submerge its whole body, while being easily accessible for the snake to exit and enter. The water dish should be appropriate to the snake’s size and juvenile snakes should be provided with smaller shallow water dishes.
Water dishes should be cleaned and refreshed daily.
Snakes that are shedding may need to access water to help soften the skin that they are shedding. If a snake appears to be having trouble shedding their skin, they can be placed in a secure container with a lid and a shallow depth of warm water (25 to 29°C) to soften the skin for a period of time no greater than an hour. The snake’s keeper will then have to remove the retained skin manually (It should be noted that when soaking a snake like this the water depth in the container should be no higher than halfway up the snakes body as if it is any higher the snake will have to constantly swim and there is a risk of drowning if the snake tires.)
When a snake sheds its skin, it is also important to ensure that the skin has come away from the snake completely as sometimes it can get caught and retained on parts of the animal which can lead to constriction and health problems. A couple of the more common areas that this can happen is the tail tip and the eyes. Retained skin in both these areas can be difficult to notice, therefore after each time the snake sheds it is essential that it is closely checked over.
One of the most common issues with retained skin is if caught on the tail tip it can constrict the tail reducing blood flow that in turn leads to necrosis and the loss of the end of the tail and may also lead to infection that could be life threatening.
Nutrition
The best and most common commercially available food for feeding snakes is whole mice. These can be purchased frozen from reptile stores and some pet stores and can be purchased in quantities that will last several months and kept in the freezer until needed. Frozen mice can be purchased in a range of sizes to allow appropriate sized mice to be purchased for the size of the snake. Frozen mice must be defrosted and fully thawed prior to feeding.
Feeding live animals to snakes is prohibited in schools.
A typical feeding schedule for a juvenile snake is one appropriately sized mouse per week. An adult snake is typically fed once every 2 weeks. When snakes are going through their “skin shedding cycle” (the eyes appear a blue-grey colour and the skin becomes dull and opaque) they will often refuse to eat and do not need to be fed.
Great care should be taken while feeding snakes as there is potential for them to mistake a handler's hand or arm for their prey, leading to accidental bites. Snakes should be fed using a long pair of forceps or similar tool to ensure that the food is held away from the handler's hand and arm.
Feeding pythons
Watch Feeding pythons (3:31)
Narrator: Taronga Zoo keeper
The small Australian group of pythons including Children’s Pythons, Stimson’s Pythons and Spotted Python in a wide variety of prey items in the wild.
They’ll eat skinks, various other lizards, geckos, small mammals, even small birds but in captivity we usually restrict them to a diet of mice. Typically, they can get all their nutritional needs from mice alone. It’s a whole bodied animal so you get all the goodness from like from Vitamin A in the liver right through to the bones, the calcium and so forth. So, we usually feed them on a diet of frozen mice.
The reason we use frozen mice over living mice is varied. A couple of reasons why we use frozen, and when I say frozen I mean frozen, fully thawed out and warmed before feeding the snake. And the reason for that it has to be thawed out properly and no frozen components in the mouse. We feed them frozen rather than pre killed rather than live because firstly a live mouse can potentially bite the snake back.
If a snake bites the mouse mid-way down the body the mouse can turn around and bite the snake potentially through the eye or something like that. Secondly, it’s deemed unethical to feed a live vertebrate animal like a mouse to a live other animal like a snake particularly it won’t feed on it straight away. And the third reason is also parasites.
A live mouse can potentially be carrying parasites and after freezing, particularly after four to six weeks any of those parasites are well and truly killed. So, there’s a few reasons, beneficial reasons why frozen is better than live. And also typically all types of snakes will eat a pre killed mouse.
So, it is quite easy to do and it is quite easy to have a pack of six or ten or twenty of these sitting in your freezer and a year’s worth or six months’ worth of mice ready to go.
Now, when choosing the right type, the right size of mice or rats for your snakes it’s important to consider the size of the snake. As a young Children’s Python or Spotted or Stimson’s Python they’ll typically feed on pinky mice. So, that mice that are within their first week of life. So, small pink mice.
As the snake gradually gets bigger the mouse will get bigger. So, then they’ll be fed fuzzy mice which is a little bit bigger. Typically, you’ll feed it a mouse that just leaves a bit of a bulge in the snake’s belly. They will be able to get their head around something much larger than themselves.
Snakes are well adapted to being able to stretch their head around the animal they’re eating. So, it doesn’t have to be by no means smaller than the head of the snake but usually you feed it something that’s going to leave a little bit of a bulge in its belly, a slight bulge after it’s finished consuming that animal.
Once you’ve finished feeding your snake it’s important to always to make sure there’s adequate heating for your snake especially after feeding. A snake will need to elevate its body temperature particularly into the low thirties even up to thirty five degrees Celsius to be able to effectively and quickly digest that meal. So, it typically seeks out a warm spot in the enclosure, sit there, warm themselves right up and that will help digestion kick started and it will speed up the digestive processes. So, it’s typically what a snake will do after the feeding. So, it’s important to make sure there is a warm spot available.
After feeding typically a snake will also have a good drink of water. With water although feeding your snake you don’t have to feed them too frequently. A snake can eat a meal like this once a week to once a fortnight. They don’t need to be fed daily like a mammal their metabolism’s a lot slower and activities a lot slower but they do need fresh water every day. So, it’s important to make sure there’s always a bowl of fresh water in the enclosure because they do drink every day or every couple of days. Feeding on the other hand doesn’t have to be as frequent.
If a snake is kept adequately warm all year round they can be fed all year round and usually one mouse like this a week is sufficient. For a large snake, adult snake one mouse like this fortnight can be sufficient because you don’t want the snake to become too obese either.
[End of transcript]