Science Fair Exhibit

[Cazador]

Yep. I'm sure that the inability to digest chitin is surprising for a lot of people. It would be like eating a corn cob for you and I. You'd get a bit of energy out of it, but you're going to pass a lot of undigested material (fiber). To be fair, snakes can go for a month without eating anything without blinking. This is litterally true because they have no eyelids (okay... terrible joke, I know). Anyway, they'll live for a month without eating anything and still show a bit of growth because they're using their limited energy reserves, and their metabolism slows. If, however, you compare their growth rate to the growth rate of snakes on a more nutritious diet (fish or rodents), you'll find quite a difference. We're not even beginning to discuss the lack of calcium, vitamins, minerals, and other essential fatty acids/nutrients that a diet of pure crickets would cause.

I also think that you'll be able to control (and describe) their living conditions if you house them in your garage, using lights on a timer and supplemental heating. It's a lot easier to say, for example, that they experienced daily conditions of 14 hours of light and 10 hours of darkness and day:night temperature variations between 85 & 75F than it would be to try and describe cloudy, sunny, rainy, windy, hot, cold, etc. conditions experienced outdoors. May I suggest that a sample size of two snakes per group is insufficient? If you have a huge range between two individuals, you won't be able to say if one of the individuals represents the norm or the exception. Hope this helps you develop a really awesome science fair experiment.
Rick

[KITKAT]

It's actually more important to realize that crickets are high in phosphorus, too. Most animals, reptiles included, need a balance between calcium and Phosphorus, and in crickets, this balance is way off.

That is why we dust the crickets with calcium dust when we feed them, and why we gut load them. In my keeping of Bearded Dragons, I find it useful to feed the dragons veggies from the cabbage family, as those veggies are high in calcium as well.