Frogs?????

[GradStudentLeper]

This does not address my initial question...

And this ignores the rest of that section of the post.

I asked for documented proof -...

I have a question for you. Given that we know and have established that lab rodent colonies have parasites, at least some of which are also parasites in wild snakes, do you think there is something somehow magical about their parasites and captive bred snakes that somehow prevents transmission? As that is what your position effectively requires you to believe in order to demand documentation in this manner. I should not need it, as it should be plainly evident.

Another question: Why are the really nice high end frozen mice irradiated if people are not paying a premium to prevent parasites?

Of course, that is now irrelevant, as I have found a rather large survey of cryptosporidium in zoo collections. Guess what I have found? C. parvum mouse genotype, found in Elaphe obsoleta, Python regius, Boa constrictor, Lampropeltis geluta, Elaphe guttata, Corallus caninus, L. triangulum, L. calligaster, and Elaphe vulpina... A well as a lot of non-snakes.

The reference for this is

Xiao, L. Et al. 2004. Genetic Diversity of Cryptosporidium spp. in Captive Reptiles. Applied and Environmental Microbiology, 70(2):891-899.

Indeed. And speculation is not fact - it's a guess.

No. Lay person speculation is a guess. I am not a lay person and am speculating from a specialized knowledge base. I am synthesizing information from across a field of study and taking it to its next logical step. That is not a guess. The only place where I am in any way making a jump, is because I do not know the exact parasite load of the average lab mouse, and thus cannot tell you what parasites can use a reptile as a vector. Everything else in that little paragraph is stuff I can teach to a freshman biology class and not have any controversy on unless a creationist makes it into the University of Texas Board of Regents. Thankfully Gov Perry( A pox be upon him) has no say in such matters.

I love how in your response you completely ignore the entire chain of logic I use to reach that conclusion. Did you read and understand it?

Yes, see Le Ann's post for more information.

A lay person's anecdotes are not evidence. Plus it is dealing with 1 out of many species, under non-controlled conditions, in a different clade than H. cinerea (Pacific treefrogs are within Pseudacris now)

"Affecting" survival is not the same as killing.

On a population level, yeah, it is.

but you have no evidence whatsoever that parasites all by their lonesome, kill wild snakes

very little will kill anything "all on its lonesome" and that is never what I claimed. I grow tired of you cherry picking snippets out of context and generally misrepresenting my arguments. If you want to know why I insult you, that is why.

Here is the original statement.

Snakes in the wild die from their parasite loads all the time. They die because they get too cold, and because they dont get enough food, or they catch another pathogen. The wild is not some magical clean place where everything is Happy Smiley Fun Times. You dont swim in a lot of the water that garter snakes live in because you will develop a lethal protazoan infection. The snakes deal with that every day.

Nothing dies from one cause typically, unless their predators use a random predation mode (like filter feeding) or they catch something with a near 100% mortality rate (ebola in humans for example... or a heavy load of chinese liver flukes). They die because they are immune suppressed due to cold and cant fight off the parasites, or because they have a bad food year and their energy intake goes below their parasite-enhanced maintenance threshold and they deplete their fat reserves, at which point they either starve or get picked off by a predator before starving. Either way the parasite load is one of many proximate and ultimate causes of mortality, and I did not claim otherwise.

This depends on the parasites of course. Some parasites will of course kill their hosts... certain flukes for example, as will Plasmodium. However that you wont detect in the wild because the animal decays and dies before you find it. The only way to detect death from parasitism in this manner is through... *gasp* correlating parasite load with recapture probability. Just like the study I cited.

especially with the frequency of that "all the time" nonsense you've stated.

The per annum mortality rate for juvenile T. elegans along Eagle Lake California alone is 80-90% (I would need to dig up the papers again to get the exact number), a portion of that is directly and indirectly due to parasites, and we are talking about thousands of little snakes per year.

T. sirtalis in Manitoba have high mortality rates from year to year as well due to "poor body condition" during hibernation. The guys that do the work never performed a necropsy on the dead ones, however poor body condition is contributed to by parasite loads.

What? Do you think that parasites just magically kill the animals? Most parasites dont actually create some sort of accute illness that by itself will kill a snake. The helminth parasites at least reduce energy and nutrient intake from food and kill indirectly via starvation. Blood parasites are a different matter, but I know little about them other than what I described above.

Maybe you should stick to subject matter that you know (whatever that may be).

Here is my area of study:

Foraging strategies in Natricine snakes, and the evolution of novel predator recognition and anti-predator strategies in frogs toward natricine snakes. Anti-predator strategies include in this case chemical defenses, behavioral defenses, and life history shifts. It also requires me to know about most of the things which are ancillary to this. Enegy budgets, sexual selection, costs of reproduction etc. I dont work with parasites, but host-parasite interactions are a subset of predator-prey interactions and they rely on the same concepts. The scale of application is just smaller.

Sounds like you're making a personal insult.

Actually no. It is a personal and public service. I just have a caustic personality, you should see me on a board with looser rules of engagement. I would also note you are committing a Style over Substance Fallacy. I am not a caustic jerk as a substitute for an argument. If you will notice, I refuted your argument (and have expanded on this from there) and then I followed by being a caustic jerk. The two are entirely different things.

Instructive example

Person 1: 2+2=5
Person 2: No. You are wrong because your (insert your mom joke here)

That is what is called an ad hominem attack, which is what you accuse me of.

What I actually do is this

Person 1: 2+2=47
Person 2: (Proof involving counting of apples and showing the other person a numberline), oh and by the way (insert your mom joke here)

You will notice how the insult is secondary to the argument. In my case, they are typically the result of frustration when someone either does not read, does not comprehend, or deliberately misrepresents my posts. All three of which are things you have demonstrated.

Yes, but if you can't prove mice have parasites that are transferrable to captive snakes (especially lab mice) why not simply feed your snakes rodents, instead of the hassle of raising frogs (if it's even possible) and STILL having the possibility that the captive-raised frogs will have parasites that are transferrable to the snake.

Because I have now established that at least cryptosporidium (and probably a lot of other stuff, like tapeworms), is transfered. A snake which does not naturally prey upon rodents will have no defenses against a parasite that uses the rodent as an obligate or facultative intermediate host, save to "hope" it gets enough food (in the case of an intestinal parasite) to get what it needs after the parasite takes its cut, or that the parasite load is low enough to not cause problems. A snake which preys upon rodents will have a variety of defenses against such parasites (the parasite will determine what those are, from chemical to cellular, to energy allocation shifts, and thermoregulatory changes)

In the same way, a snake which preys upon fish and frogs will have more defenses against the parasites that use them as hosts than those which do not.

Not all parasites are equal. You also need to consider per-parasite risk

As for me. Did my undergraduate work at ASU, now I am at the University of Texas, Arlington.

[GradStudentLeper]

O)K....... now that you two are hopefully done arguing in circles on my post and neither one of you has answered my question.

Because it is cheaper to go to a pond and collect tadpoles or breeding adults, those frogs are wild caught. However because you got your snake at a petco, so is your snake. It was feeding on frogs in the wild, (maybe not cinerea, but most frogs have the same parasites AFAIK), and it already has plenty of parasites that it is dealing with.

Now, after a month at the usual temps, and assuming the snake is not a mated female, that snake is rapidly depleting its fat reserves, particularly with its existing parasite loads (and yes, it has them, and so do you). The one frog will probably not significantly harm the snake, and if you can get him to eat, go for it. If you are that worried about parasites, freeze the frog first. The only significant risk is getting the snake "strung out" on frogs. If that happens... Carolina Biological Supply is your friend (you can google them) they sell bullfrog tadpoles in bulk, year round. The frogs are wild collected... but honestly, they are cheap and bullfrogs are about the last species of frog on earth that will go extinct, or even have its populations scratched by commercial collection.

If you dont want to go through that, you can always buy the frog, and violate it (by which I mean, rub a dead mouse all over it, then let the frog take a hot shower while it cries and wails about being violated by someone it trusts).

[Stefan-A]

you should see me on a board with looser rules of engagement.

I'd like to point out that you're both stretching them as it is. I suggest you both calm down a bit and focus on what the disagreement is. I don't want to have to terminate another discussion just because of juvenile **** fencing.

[k2l3d4]

Because it is cheaper to go to a pond and collect tadpoles or breeding adults, those frogs are wild caught. However because you got your snake at a petco, so is your snake. It was feeding on frogs in the wild, (maybe not cinerea, but most frogs have the same parasites AFAIK), and it already has plenty of parasites that it is dealing with.

Now, after a month at the usual temps, and assuming the snake is not a mated female, that snake is rapidly depleting its fat reserves, particularly with its existing parasite loads (and yes, it has them, and so do you). The one frog will probably not significantly harm the snake, and if you can get him to eat, go for it. If you are that worried about parasites, freeze the frog first. The only significant risk is getting the snake "strung out" on frogs. If that happens... Carolina Biological Supply is your friend (you can google them) they sell bullfrog tadpoles in bulk, year round. The frogs are wild collected... but honestly, they are cheap and bullfrogs are about the last species of frog on earth that will go extinct, or even have its populations scratched by commercial collection.

If you dont want to go through that, you can always buy the frog, and violate it (by which I mean, rub a dead mouse all over it, then let the frog take a hot shower while it cries and wails about being violated by someone it trusts).

No He is a 08 checkered male garter that has not eaten since I switched to Rodent Pro pinkie mice... He loved the expensive f/t pinkies that Petco provides but he was eating me out of room and board while eating those...I just heard of another garter owner that has had issues with their snakes switching to rodentpro.... I think that i am going to pick up one green frog, a few orange colored feeder fish, and a pack of the expensive mice.. (that is only three and not enought to fill him up), ... maybe teh combination of the three willl work....

[k2l3d4]

I'd like to point out that you're both stretching them as it is. I suggest you both calm down a bit and focus on what the disagreement is. I don't want to have to terminate another discussion just because of juvenile **** fencing.

Thank you Stefan... I am getting sick of reading the arguing just to see if any one has answered my post.

[Cerastes]

k2l3d4, It's ok to feed your Thamnophis H. cinerea. They are relatively "cheap" and in my experience garters aren't too bad in the "getting strung out" department.

The more important question here that has so far been unasked (or I missed it) regards your tank/vivarium specs, temperatures, etc. A snake that is at an improper temperature will be very difficult to get feeding; The same holds for snakes that are stressed. And, often times, snakes will just be off of feeding for no apparent reason whatsoever.

[Stefan-A]

Sorry. I get frustrated when someone refuses to actually engage an argument. This guy cannot write a sentence without using one logical fallacy or another. It is becoming irritating, and there is a concrete limit (and that limit is admittedly low) to how much of that I am willing to tolerate before I browbeat someone.

Understandable, but enough is enough. No progress is being made here, the discussion has degenerated into simple bickering. Regardless of who's right, it needs to end now.

If the two of you have anything to say to each other, do it privately. If it continues here, it will be deleted.

[Stefan-A]

If the two of you have anything to say to each other, do it privately. If it continues here, it will be deleted.

That goes for everybody else, as well. Comments about somebody's debating style don't belong here, either.

[gregmonsta]

I am interested in knowing what sorts of parasites pinkies contain that can be transferred to snakes. Especially the lab mice that people tend to use to feed their reptiles.

So here's a good parasite link that was designed to educate rat keeper's, how to care for their pets.
Almost each and every species of parasite mentioned can survive in their new host the snake.

Rat & Mouse Gazette: Medical Corner: The Worms Crawl In, The Worms Crawl Out

Pinworms are especially a problem for people who feed live.

[Cerastes]

As far as breeding H. cinerea goes, I can speak with some qualification that these guys (at least) amplex rather readily: I have had one on my arm next to a tank without the screen lid, only to have a male jump from the tank and crawl up my arm to engage in amplexus!

North American Hylids are by far the most straight- forward of the family to keep in the average house at average ambient temperatures/humidity; The difficulty lies in raising the metamorphs to something that can accept pinhead crickets (try flightless fruit flies here)

Now, speaking in terms of disease transmission, it is very unlikely that your Thamnophis (marcianus?) is even "clean" of parasites to begin with, regardless of being the captive born snake that it is! Between feeding it lab mice, fish, walking outdoors and handling the snake in the same clothes and/or not washing your hands, your snake is harboring parasites.
The key to mitigating the damage that these parasites cause is to keep the snake in a “stress-free” environment with adequate food and heat so that it can maintain its immune system and keep these parasite populations under control.