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frost bit

Faithfulness91

Faithfulness91

New member
my husband and i were getting everthing ready to feed and noticed that some of the mice had white spots and lims were falling off is it safe to feed them to my collection... see i bought them in bulk at a swap, so if they are not good i could buy more this sunday but how do i keep them fresher should i get that ice or a different freezer that i can keep colder... please help :cry:
 
best way to keep frozen things longer and fresher is to vacuum seal them. These mice are probably still viable to feed to your snakes.
 
I feed out Freezer burnt pinkies all the time. Snakes don't care. I care~ I asked for a vaccuum seal machine for the Holiday!

Feed them out~ don't waste them~ snakes could care less about a little freezer burn!
 
good question spirit!

I was wondering the same thing. Last month I sent my b/f to get the pinks and a few were "yellowish" I threw them away.
 
The only thing you are losing as the mice become more freezer burnt is nutritive value and palatability (or whatever the equivalent is in snakes - scentability?). They do not become harmful to the snake. White spots on the skin aren't going to harm the snake, it's just dehydrated skin. If the desiccation penetrates into the muscle, etc., the nutriative value does down, but doesn't hurt the snake.

To avoid desiccation, the gold standard is vacuum packing. Apart from that, I try to slow it down by always keeping them in sealed plastic bags with as much of the air as possible expressed out. Leaving bags full of air in with the pinkies will accelerate freezer burn. Use as small a bag as possible and express the air. Double bagging helps, as does wrapping in aluminum foil or sealing in a tupperware container.

As far as when things may not be so good for your snake, if you thaw out a mouse and it smells foul...it is foul, chuck it in the toilet. If it's discolored, mushy, or the skin is so thin that it ruptures...I chuck them. If they are dark purple instead of pink or whitish, I chuck them.

That's my practice with them, anyway. Good luck. Enjoy the swap this weekend.
 
I had a dark purple/red pinkie about a month ago, I wanted to chuck it but my mom fed it to the snake! She got an earful about that I tell you, but he seems to be fine. Did I get lucky or was there nothing wrong with this pinkie?
 
Obviously day old pinkies will be a deep pink. These are the ones that most rapidly turn a dark purple coloration, but others will as well with time unthawed prior to freezing.

All the dark coloration and limpness tells me is that the pinky didn't freeze until later after it died. I always worry that those dark ones were ones that were dead when the mouse supplier went to harvest the batch and they just threw it in. No telling how long it had been dead for. The longer they are dead for, the longer time the bacteria in their guts have had time to flourish within the pinky. Honestly, unless the pink smelled rancid, it was probably fine, I just don't like to take the risk.
 
Vacuum packing question: I have a jar with a seal that can be vacuumed packed multiple times. Assume I would have to freeze them before applying vacuum to jar. Can I use this as is or would it be best to put them in a ziplock and 'express' the air out then vacuum the jar? The mice I've purchased in bulk came vacuum packed but obviously that seal is broken so the benefit of having them shipped that way is lost.
 
Yes, you would have to 'flash freeze' them before you vacuum seal them. If not, you run the risk of the pressure literally squeezing out liquids and it becoming a disgusting mess.

Flash freeze them until they're still, probably an hour or so should be plenty. You can then wrap them in plastic and put them in your jar. If you have a vacuum sealer, do that with a bunch of mice, put them in small ziplock bags and place those inside a larger vacuum sealer bag and go to town. That way, when you need more mice, you can just cut open the bag and take out however many individual ziplocked mice you need.
 
I agree with Joejr. I have a vacume seal at home and will take small sandwich bags and place like 5 mice in each of the bags (the half sized candy bags are the best) and then place them in a large sealable bag and vacume it. I make sure to leave enough room (extra length) so that when I open the bag, I can reseal it again. Good luck!

LadyLaw
 
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