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- Jan 19, 2014
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Because a t will only eat so much before being ready to molt....lets say for a particular sling its 5 crickets and it will be filled....well, that sling also needs a certain amount of time to pass to allow for its body to produce the new exo skeleton...lets say that's 40 days.
Now, you could feed those 5 crickets weekly (one a week) and it might fill up right in line with its new growth and you might not get much of any fasting period and growth will still be occurring at a near maximum pace. (assuming for the sake of the example that temps are ideal)
But if you take the same one, and feed it those 5 crickets to that sling in a single week, its now plump, uninterested in food and just awaiting its molting process to finish underneath its old exo...so in this case that t might be fasting for a month because food intake greatly out paced the ts own biological ability to be ready for that next molt.
Light feeding schedules will have a more profound effect slowing growth than heavy feeding schedules will with regards to speeding growth. Like if I fed that aforementioned sling twice a month...now its taking me 75 days to feed those 5 crickets and plump the t...which is 35 days longer than the quickest time the t can form a new exo...so now you are waiting on the food supply to catch up with the biology, which would in essence, potentially double the amount of time between molts.
Neither is wrong or right, the t won't suffer or anything, it will just fast a lot longer if fed heavily, which for new keepers, can be incredibly frustrating as we see in threads on a regular basis.
Its very easy to feed at a faster pace than the t can be ready to molt biologically...which is why pre-molt fasts are normal...and why heavy feeding schedules generally see much longer fasting periods.
Temps also play a more significant role as well, but that's another discussion as ideal temps are needed to truly maximize growth rates...too low and things will slow...and the same thing will actually occur if things are kept too hot...everything has an ideal temp...IME it seems like 77-82 produces the most consistently fast growth rates.
Now, you could feed those 5 crickets weekly (one a week) and it might fill up right in line with its new growth and you might not get much of any fasting period and growth will still be occurring at a near maximum pace. (assuming for the sake of the example that temps are ideal)
But if you take the same one, and feed it those 5 crickets to that sling in a single week, its now plump, uninterested in food and just awaiting its molting process to finish underneath its old exo...so in this case that t might be fasting for a month because food intake greatly out paced the ts own biological ability to be ready for that next molt.
Light feeding schedules will have a more profound effect slowing growth than heavy feeding schedules will with regards to speeding growth. Like if I fed that aforementioned sling twice a month...now its taking me 75 days to feed those 5 crickets and plump the t...which is 35 days longer than the quickest time the t can form a new exo...so now you are waiting on the food supply to catch up with the biology, which would in essence, potentially double the amount of time between molts.
Neither is wrong or right, the t won't suffer or anything, it will just fast a lot longer if fed heavily, which for new keepers, can be incredibly frustrating as we see in threads on a regular basis.
Its very easy to feed at a faster pace than the t can be ready to molt biologically...which is why pre-molt fasts are normal...and why heavy feeding schedules generally see much longer fasting periods.
Temps also play a more significant role as well, but that's another discussion as ideal temps are needed to truly maximize growth rates...too low and things will slow...and the same thing will actually occur if things are kept too hot...everything has an ideal temp...IME it seems like 77-82 produces the most consistently fast growth rates.
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