Observation about minnow feeding

[FunkyRes]

I have a 1.1 pair of neonate WC locality T elegans elegans. They are primarily eating Pseudacris regilla (when collected, one of them coughed up a recently devoured P regilla, P regilla are plentiful, so ...) but I also caught some local minnows. Two minnows were placed in a maroon colored water dish, the rest in a plastic transparent measuring cup (if you come to my house and I feed you, don't worry - I use glass for measuring cups for cooklng ;))

Even though I have seen both garters in the water dish, both those minnows remained uneaten until they died. However, the garters regularly climbed into the measuring cup to catch minnows.

I'm guessing the minnows may be easier for them to see and thus catch in the measuring cup. Anyway, just thought I'd mention it in case anyone was having trouble getting their garters to eat fish from a water dish.

[Charis]

Our young garters were the same way for the first little bit after we caught them. We had a rock water dish with a black buttom & they had trouble seeing the guppies in there. So for the first few weeks we'd hold them in our hand & feed them from a small clear plastic medicine measuring cup. We were pretty lucky, for WC garters they were pigs right off the bat. After a while though we would scoop the guppies out of their tank using that cup & put them in the rock dish & the garters seemed to know that that cup meant food & would rush over to the dish & start hunting in it. It would take them a bit longer to find the fish that way, but not by much.

[GradStudentLeper]

Generalist garter snakes are not very good at actually catching fish. T. elegans is one such generalist. they tend to catch fish which are trapped in shallow pools in high density. They are better at catching land bound frogs, or frogs at the margins of aquatic habitats. T. atratus has no such difficulty

[FunkyRes]

T elegans [elegans,terestris] are generally not fish eaters.

T elegans vagrans (and the now invalidated klamath subspecies) are quite adept at catching fish and frequently feed on them in the wild, even from rapid water. Just noting that to be clear. See Stebbins for more info.

Note though that in this observation, the measuring cup has more and deeper water, the garters have no trouble catching the fish - it is the fish in the water dish they did not consume.