What Do Garter Snakes Eat? Garter Snake Food
What Do Garter Snakes Eat? Garter Snake Foods
Fortunately, even the most serious problems can be avoided with a little knowledge, and knowing the pros and cons of each food, feeding a garter snake need not be a cause for concern.
On this page you will find more information about the pros and cons of different species of garter snake as well as a complete list of the most common foods available to the snake.
Feed Them A Varied Diet
If you do not have a garter snake that eats mice, you can feed them a varied diet to ensure a complete diet, but other foods must be supplemented or fed in combination with it. If the snake is small and the mouse is a “complete food” or the other food is in any way deficient, cut it down to a diet of large – full-bodied worms, fish or worms, which are occasionally added as described below. Young garter snakes that do not eat the pinky mouse (or its pinky part) can be fed with the mice they eat. Other foods that are not deficient in any way or accepted by the snakes, such as fish, worms or fish, are occasionally cut into smaller pieces and occasionally fish and worms are added, occasionally as a supplement or part of a larger diet.
Ideally, the snake should switch to a mouse-based diet as soon as possible, but you can occasionally offer fish and worms if you want. If your snake is too small for the pinky mouse, start with a diet of large, full-bodied worms, fish or worms and smell the mouse to encourage it to eat if necessary. If they eat a healthy diet with the garter snake, they are less susceptible to parasitic infections, which can be very difficult to treat. As it turns out, all mice should be eaten by garter snakes, even if they do not start as part of a complete diet.
This means, for example, that the pink mouse can be eaten by a garter snake at least once a week, and sometimes more often.
In a perfect world, this would make up the bulk of their diet, but it has legal and environmental implications. In the wild, most adult garter snakes feed on frogs and toads, and this can have legal or environmental implications, especially in areas with a high proportion of invasive species such as forests.
Wild Garter Snakes
Although wild garter snakes constantly eat frogs and toads, they are used to it and should almost never be used in captivity. Frogs, toads and tadpoles are teeming with parasites and are highly likely to transmit them to the snake.
Garter snakes do not necessarily have a hardened immune system due to constant stress, but they should not be used as food in captivity if the snake refuses to eat anything else.
Parasites
There are also concerns about the transmission of parasites such as earthworms, and worms collected from roads, sidewalks or golf courses during a rainstorm can contain poison even if they are convenient. There is also a high risk of transmitting diseases from your home to other animals such as rats, mice, birds, rats and mice.
Depending on where they are collected, there is potential for parasites and toxins, and snakes need much of both. Most garter snakes eat worms, earthworms, worms and other insects as well as other animals such as birds and mammals.
Baby Snakes
For many garter snakes, worms are often the only food they reliably eat, but most baby snakes will also prefer earthworms. So far, we have not found any problems that we can attribute to the earthworm, which we can attribute to snakes that do not eat it. On the other hand, some species of snakes will not want them because of the potential for parasites and toxins, and some species of snakes, such as black-legged snakes, will not want them even though they want them.
Worms collected in the garden are particularly popular, like dew worms, but beware of large muscular revellers; they should be cut off when eating and not strong enough to crawl back if you are not careful. They expect their prey to twitch a little, so ignore them and cut them into small pieces. A large night trolley, cut in quarters, is as sufficient as buying a night in the bait shop.
Best To Avoid Mixing Them Up
If you are not sure which one is which, it is best to avoid mixing them up, as you can learn in this article. There are, of course, worms that are used for mixing, such as the type of red worm that garter snakes can feed on but are never used on bedside tables; they are said to be toxic to garter snakes, and if you are not sure what one is, avoid mixed worms until you are sure. Of course, there are worms that are used for mixing and sometimes sold as trout bait, so if they feed mainly on worms, they should be supplemented with calcium. Some worms have a calcium deficiency which is a cause for concern and can also cause problems for the snake.
See the supplement below for details and for more information on the different types of worms and their effects on garter snakes, see the supplements below.
I once had an Eastern stray snake, a species that normally eats earthworms I had never eaten, and its nose was sometimes curled by a fine individual of another species that normally ate earthworms. I have not normally eaten garters of this kind and have never been eaten by them.
There were problems with using fish as a food source that led me not to use it unless you absolutely have to.
Medical Problems
Regular feeding with live forage fish can expose a snake to several medical problems. Live fish are useful when a garter snake refuses to eat anything else, but they can transmit internal parasites that can leave a persistent infection of roundworms, tapeworms and anemones that can be difficult to treat. If contaminated fish are eaten by the snake, symptoms of infection can appear just a few days after ingestion.
Goldfish are essentially junk fish with poor nutritional value and should be avoided at all costs. Certain species of live fish may pose additional risks, but they are not as dangerous to a garter snake as live fish.
Other fish contain an enzyme called thiaminase, which destroys vitamin B1, or “thiamin,” and the snake causes a potentially fatal vitamin deficiency (see vitamin B1 deficiency). It is not recommended to use live fish unless your snake eats something else, and it is recommended to buy only live fish that can only eat garter snakes. Most garter bushes eat fish, but they ignore all other food and only eat live fish when they have to.
Fish fillets are relatively inexpensive, but live fish often carry parasites and can cause serious health problems for garter snakes.
Fish carry a high proportion of an enzyme that leads to a serious vitamin deficiency, especially in garter snakes and other reptiles such as leeches and snakes.
Goldfish Are Not Good For Garter Snakes
Goldfish are not good for garter snakes, live fish are expensive in quantities sufficient to feed them, and fish fillets are a nutrient-poor supplement. Not all garter snakes accept fish fillets, but they like the taste and texture of the fish.
The result is watery, stinking feces that bleed from the stomach of garter snakes and can cause diarrhoea, vomiting and even death.
Fish fillets are very convenient because they can be bought frozen in the supermarket, but they are not a wholesome food and should not be the only ingredient in snake food. Regular intake of calcium and vitamins is necessary, and garters that live on fillet strips have nutrients that are found in whole fish. For example, perch are known to contain thiaminase, and fish filleting can certainly be used for this. Freezing whole fish does not destroy thieninases and presents parasites with the same problem as freezing for more than 30 days.
Homemade Garter Snake Food
I have developed a homemade garter snake food based on trout from a nearby trout farm. I put the whole trout in a blender, mix it with gelatin, fill it with blocks, put it in the freezer and mix and freeze it. It is best in combination with worms and mice, but also with fish fillet strips and other fish.
The recipe is available on my website, and the strips are cut into strips if needed, but it is also best with fish fillet strips.
It may come as a surprise to some owners that the most unproblematic food for the garter snake is actually mice. Garter snakes eat rodents, although it is not considered a natural food in the wild, and Garter snakes certainly need to eat mice for a decade or more. Garter mice have been fed mice in captivity for years, with no obvious negative effects. The red-spotted Gartner snake eats mouse, but it is not the only one of its kind to do so.
The main advantage of using mice is that they are more nutritious than fish and worms and do not require any supplements. Garter snakes are much less watery and stink, which drills the faeces of garter snakes so there is no risk of thiamine deficiency. Another major advantage is that mice are a better source of protein than most other animals, such as rats, mice or birds, due to their high levels of calcium, magnesium, iron, phosphorus, potassium, calcium and magnesium. They grow faster and not only grow, they don’t need to be fed as often and there is no risk of a deficiency of liamine, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association.
Drawbacks
In fact, using mice has only two drawbacks, and none of them has anything to do with their nutritional value. Garter snakes are perfectly healthy and can eat nothing but mice, but some keepers may not feel comfortable feeding mice to their snakes and may opt for a garter snake to avoid feeding the mice themselves. Mice are nutritionally perfect and in fact the only downside of their use is that they can cause a rise in blood pressure and heart disease.
Bowel movements are less common, stink less and damage the digestive system of the snake less than other animals such as rats and mice.
Not all garter snakes can be trained to eat mice or accept them, and not all keepers want to feed mice to their snakes. While most garter snakes easily get used to mice, there may be some stubborn individuals who don’t want to be touched or are just too unpredictable to be offered. A young garter snake may be too young to eat mice, or too old to try the mouse part of chopping off the pinky. Some garter snakes may need to be trained to accept mice, and others may not be able to eat them at all after a few weeks of training.