Trout Chow Feeding?

[Stefan-A]

Ca, D3, A, C, E, K, B1, B2, B6. B12, folic, nicotinic, pantothenic acids, biotin, choline, niacin, P, Na, Fe, Co, I, Mn, Zn, Se, Cu.

That is all.

[Jeff B]

Steve, there has been a lot of opinions and speculations thrown out to your idea, but no data or real answers. Why don't you run an experiment with controls, you never know the trout chow my yield better growth rates, increased fertility, better resistance to pathogens and disease, longer life expectancy. Run an experiment and you will produce real answers to your question with real data.
The main ingredient is fish meal after all, and the supplemental additives are a bonus if in moderation, which I am sure they are, overdosing isn't cost effective for a cheap food like that. I would think the bigger challenge would be getting a snake to consistently eat a prep food like that, but sounds like you had some takers. If you have a batch of babies try a few on trout chow and a few on your regular regiment and see if you notice any difference, may take a couple years, maybe you won't see any difference in which case the cost and convenience will still be a benefit. I like the idea and I might try the experiment myself too.

[guidofatherof5]

I'm not sure I have a couple groups to do this test on

[Selkielass]

Might be interesting to split a litter and raise similar groups on this diet, and on a more traditional diet, if only for a few months to see how weight gain and growth compare. 10-20 snakes is a pretty small sample, but still might yield interesting results.

(And you can immediately terminate the experiment if any negative effects become apparent.)

[aSnakeLovinBabe]

I have heard of people feeding their snakes reptomin turtle sticks before... and I actually have stuffed minnows and guppies with these sticks as an extra nutritional supplement since stores generally starve their feeder fish. Last year out of curiosity, I offered a few of my red-striped ribbon babies some that had been soaked in water. To my surprise... they ate them plain.... I still would be cautious about feeding commercialized diets to my snakes.... but if steve is willing to test it out on some radixes I don't see much harm in doing so.

[ConcinusMan]

Steve is in a unique position to experiment with groups of radixes and collect the data and record observations (he's good at that) Far too many of us have few snakes, or highly valuable snakes and just can't do that.

I'm not saying inject them with radioactive material, feed them dog food, or anything like that, but reasonable and controlled dietary experimenting over a few years to see what happens would be a great contribution to the hobby.

[Kevinh583]

I think a study would be a great idea. There are very few studies being conducted on any kind of pet food because long term studies are usually very time consuming and expensive. Pet food suppliers instead simply use models to modify and approve nutritional content for food.

Some members of this forum are in the unique position that would allow them to conduct a dietary study with only a little extra time and money. A longer term study like that would be very interesting to hobbyists and even vets/scientists and long as the appropriate research protocol/methodology was followed.

[Jeff B]

I'm going to try it out on some scale, if they will eat it, but at this point I have sold all of this years babies, minus a handful of personal holdbacks for breeders, so I don't have any sample size worth documenting, besides I do enough of that at my day job, so my experimental part will be very small and informal. Even if some of us hobbiest try it and achieve some good positive informal results, then maybe someone who is in school or working in reseach, could have a good starting point to write up a real research project intended for publication, although at this point I am not sure if that garter snake nutritional optimization would exactly be a hot item with all the molecular work being more of a focus now, certainly it could be valuable and could be applied research to the hobby and the pet food industry, but not really important basic research, so funding may be a challege.

[Stefan-A]

Funding is usually a challenge in projects that aren't commercial.

Any experiment involving garters would be interesting, but organizing a decade-long double-blind experiment with a few dozen snakes would be a challenge.