Worms verses Mice

[Mommy2many]

I am concerned about the environmental toxins. I get my worms from my old garden and/or woods. There are no pesticides or "anything" used out here that I know of. Wouldn't these worms be safer for my snakes?

I'm not scraping them off my driveway or patio. They are out in the dirt garden I had last year. (No pesticides used)

[jamromhem]

well if there are no signs of pesticides then I wouldn't see why it wouldn't be ok..

Also if you are able to get worms at such an availability you are lucky :P I have to buy mine :P..

I live in hat as H**L texas and the dirt wouldn't support worms if I wanted it to..

I would see if there is some way to test for pesticides or something and grind up one of these worms or more and test it to see if it is holding any in it.

[drache]

I really don't know what's safe any more
I mean - not sure how toxins travel
after all, there's pharmaceuticals in the ground water now
I would assume that distance from industry and agriculture helps, but is no guarantee

[jamromhem]

My thought on it is... take a bucket of dirt. and some filtered water (preferred reverse osmosis after a chlorine filter/water softener. I have that in my house only cost a few grand :P ) make a worm bed. with the above mentioned items. Collect leaves from trees as they are still green. Oven dry them to kill parasites. (possibly precook the dirt to be sure) use the oven dried leaves as cover for the dirt and add some of the filtered water. This would be the purest thing I can think of for the decontamination of the worms.. i would also think to let the adults breed in small enclosures and pull the adults out and then use the second generation worms to prevent the toxins built up in the adults to be removed from the "semi-sterile" environment.

If you are that concerned.

My though is that if the area that you caught your snake or the area around your house it that toxic, then things probably would have all died there anyway. The world isn't that bad off yet. Getting there maybe, but not there yet. If there is not a environmental warning in your area then worry less.

Though the idea of a purified worm bed is a novel one. I might make one for the sake of beginning an earthworm feeder farm to sell worms to all of the toxin concerned peoples.

[Mommy2many]

I figured that since both worms and snakes came from same acre of land, can't be all that bad for either. We are not in an urban area and not pesticides are used on my property, so that has to be the safest place I can get anything, without resorting to my own purified worm farm Though I did try & start one for my snakes and that got icky really fast Not sure what I did wrong but you didn't want to open the lid...

[drache]

they're probably pretty safe where you are
sorry - I was in a bit of a doomsday mood yesterday

[Mommy2many]

No problem. The more info thrown at us the better we can make an educated decision. In the end, there are usually a few different ways to do things and we have to pick our own ways. I love to listen to everybody's input and then go from there.

[BChambers]

No, I just think everyone is seeing a naturally more aggressive feeding reaction based on the species/population their snakes originally came from in the wild. Your radix obviously originate from a population of rodent feeders, while these others came from a more worm/amphibian oriented wild stock.

Not only are individual animals highly variable, so are species/populations!