How Fast Do Corn Snakes Grow? - The Time Scales

How Fast do Corn Snakes Grow? Well the short answer is about 2 years to become fully grown. However there are many factors that can effect the speed at which your corn snake will grow and also at the size your beloved corn snake will grow to. We will now explain the different things that influence your corn snakes growth.

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Before we get into it remember these facts. Corn snakes can grow to be anywhere from 2.5- 5 feet in length. Corn snakes will rarely grow to be more than 5 feet long. Males are the more larger of the sexes females are almost always smaller. At the time of hatching, corn snakes will be between 8-14 inches in length. It will take them approximately 2 years to reach their full length.

One of the most obvious contributing factors to how fast do corn snakes grow is how often they are fed. You might think that is obvious, but in many studies it has been proven that when snakes eat twice as much they do in deed get bigger.

How fast do corn snakes grow?. This can be answered in part by looking at the types of studies where snakes are fed twice that of another group. When snakes are fed twice as much they do on average have a mass gain of more than two times that of the snakes that are only fed half as much. Also noteworthy is that the group of snakes that was fed twice as much also almost doubled in length.

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THE LUDLOW HIGH SCHOOL STUDY

(This is not our own study, but one we have found which we feel has some relevance to this question).

“This year, not wanting to repeat the same experiments, I asked the students what they might want to learn about these snakes that we could physically determine by good scientific procedure. One interesting idea that came up was the relationship between food and growth rate. If a snake were fed twice as much as another, would it literally grow twice as much? This sounded like a great experiment to undertake.

The Experiment

We used eight baby corns that were born in July of 2014. Four of them (Snakes 1 – 4) served as a control, and were fed a F/T pink every Tuesday, once a week. The other four (Snakes 5 – 8) served as the experimental group and were fed again on Friday, as well as Tuesday. All were kept in standard plastic shoeboxes in the back of my classroom and all neonates were born of the same parents in the same clutch. Every Monday, the snakes were massed and length was measured. The mass is accurate, however, due to the nature of measuring a squirming baby snake, the length cannot be guaranteed to be as precise. (These were 9th grade students doing the data collection!) We also massed the pinks each time they were fed to be sure that no one snake was getting larger pinks than the others.

Conclusion

According to our results, the snakes that were fed twice as much, did indeed have a mass gain of more than two times that of the control group. Length gain, although not as accurate, was also very close to twice that of the control group. The only exception was the mass gain by experimental group snake number six. This snake stopped feeding for four weeks during late Feb. and March.

Average gains in weights of snakes 5-8 were more than double the control snakes with one exception, snake six which went off feed for one month.

Although most of the students hypothesized that this would happen, it came as a bit of a surprise to me. I have bred and kept snakes for many years, and although I guessed the snakes that were fed more would grow more, I didn’t think it would actually be over twice as much as depicted by our data.

The kids really enjoyed this experiment. They learned a great deal about corn snake husbandry while also experiencing many of the intricacies of real life data collection. Several of the students who were afraid of the snakes to begin with have developed an actual affection for their charge. I believe that there is much more to science education than just text books and cookie cutter labs. If the kids can develop a healthy respect for the natural world and all its denizens while learning good scientific procedures, they are learning real science.”