Total nutrition for my garters

[BUSHSNAKE]

I wonder how you would gutload them, and what with though....hmmm.

Im sure you can find the answers with a little research

[boyer45]

Thanks for all the great information!! I love it!! I have one eating small mice and one eating pinkies. Both frozen thawed. I think I will offer some Night Crawlers in between.I hesitate to do fish just because of the problems they can cause.

[Eddie]

I've been using F/T rodents and tap water for many years with good results. I feed babies every 3 days, sub-adults every 5 days and adults every 7 days. As far as gut loading goes I don't think it's necessary but if you wanted to you just inject the prey item with liquid vitamins with a needle and syringe.

[Rushthezeppelin]

I'd stay away from anything that has hair though. It seems garters aren't equipped to handle hair like other snakes that can be put on a rodent diet. It's best to stick to mice pinks then move up to rat pinks if need be.

[mcspin]

I wonder how you would gutload them, and what with though....hmmm.

In the fish raising industry, we commonly gut-load worms for feeding fish. We generally use powdered foods like spirulina algae, astaxanthin, protein powders, etc. Some of these would actually turn the worm the color of the food. It works very well when trying to get different foods into animals that might not normally get much. In the wild, they always get the stomach contents of their prey, which is often very high quality nutrition in itself. I see no reason why this wouldn't work well with snakes. I'm currently feeding lots of live guppies and swordtails to my garters and I always fill the fish's stomach with a high quality food before feeding the fish to the snakes.

[boyer45]

I am worried about the comment about rodent hair. I have only fed my bigger snake one whole mouse so far and can switch back to pinkies. I just hope I have not done any harm.

[slipknot711]

one whole mouse i dont think is the concern. i think its repeated ingestion of the hair. you can also find hairless mice online. but rat pinks are great in place of the mice.

[Qwerty3159]

Agreed. I swear by the rat pinks, luckily I have a store where I can get them in town.