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How can you tell how old the snake is?

amyr

New member
We bought our snake from Petco this past Saturday. The people there couldn't tell me exactly how old the snake is. They said no more than 5 months old. Can anybody tell me how we can determine this?
 
petco and petsmart buy from a mass breeder and they likely only feed a maintanance diet before they get to petco and petco feeds once every 1 or 2 weeks depending on the store so, unfortionately, there is not dead set way to tell.
 
that stinks!! the vet wants to know how old the snake is. petco only feeds the snakes on Mondays every week. I have had him since saturday-fed him sunday and fed him again today and he ate like a champ!! i think we are going to stick to feeding him every 4-5 days since he did so well with that.
 
He's probally under a year but you really have no way of knowing, and the vet should be able to understand that given where the snake came from.
 
count the rings? LOL.

Seriously, there's no way of knowing how old a snake it. You can get a rough idea by the size of the snake, but that's no where near accurate since size depends on feeding schedule + the fact that some snakes simply grow at different rates than others.

My one year old lavender is no where near a big as my amber was when he was one year old. They have the exact same feeding schedule...my amber just grew faster.
 
The breeder who supplies Petco sends the animals out after they are solidly feeding. That generally means two or three voluntary meals. Odds are pretty good that unless the animal has been at the store a long time he is less than 3 months of age. If you take a weight in grams, it should be pretty easy to estimate.
 
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