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Posted by sasheena on May 04, 2003 at 16:21:01:
In Reply to: a question about feeding live and breeding mice.......... posted by mike_panic on May 04, 2003 at 12:49:57:
I currently house my corn snakes and my apalachicola king snakes in the "mouse room" as well as all of my husband's lizards are in the same room. So the snakes are surrounded by potential prey. I have found that when I have small bins of 1.2 to 1.3 I get a nice amount of babies, and a few more than that when I have groups of 1.6 to 1.8 mice. But really the amount of babies doesn't seem to increase with larger cages and more females. The only problem is of course the more males the more male stink. I clean the mouse cages twice a week, and have a bit of a "formula" for keeping the smell down to a minimum. Haven't been able to afford all of the ingredients, but will soon enough. Usually I place them on pine (compared aspen to pine, it STANK and did NOT absorb moisture the way pine does), with a teeny tiny sprinkling of cedar (yes, I know, it's bad for them), when I have the wherewithal I tend to purchase some of the clorophyll bedding at the petstore and put a thin layer of that over the thinner layer of cedar and under the thicker layer of pine. I throw in raw cotton from the fields, which the mice use to construct their nests out of. With the chlorophyll pine, regular pine, cedar, and a few sprigs of alfalfa or timothy hay, the cages are virtually without smell. I still clean twice a week, but the cages also clean easier. No sticky gooey lumps of soiled bedding to pry off the bottom of the cages. The snakes don't seem to notice the mice much, though the lizards are a little stressed by the presence of the snakes. In july we'll be removing the snakes form the mouse room permanently.
I tend to feed live less and less as the snakes grow older. The corn snakes who are all '02 get live pinkies. If they're not hungry, the pinkies go back to be with momma and live to feed a snake another day. By the time the snake is old enough to eat hoppers I supervise eating, and when they get to consuming full grown mice I stun the mice (but I'm not too good at it, usually I end up killing them).
Anyway, that's probably more than you asked for. :)
~Sasheena
