How Often Do Snakes Eat?

Video Transcript

"How often do snakes eat? Well, it's kind of a complicated question. Of course the easy answer is as often as possible. I mean if we're talking about wild snakes out in the wild they're going to eat whenever they get a chance. Now for some wild snakes that means they're eating every week, every couple of days. For some, like say the emerald tree boa means that they may be eating four times a year. The availability of food and the ease of catch greatly determines the amount of food that a snake is going to get. Now most snakes kept in captivity are going to eat either on a weekly or a monthly basis. Most of the colubrids, like say corn snakes, rat snakes, king snakes tend to want to eat on a weekly to biweekly basis. They have very fast metabolisms. They tend to go through their food very quickly because they move a lot faster, they burn a lot more energy. The larger boidaes like the pythons, and the boas are going to be more on the every three weeks to every month kind of a schedule. Their pray items are usually going to be a bit larger but they don't tend to move around as much and they don't tend to burn nearly as much energy as say the colubrids do. So to recap really it's quite a large variable. Anywhere from every couple of days if he's a baby and a colubrid to four times a year. So if you're keeping a captive snake and you're trying to find out how often to feed it make sure you do as much possible research on that particular species because every species is going to have its own metabolism, it's own rate of food intake."