Does anyone feed with vitamins?

I have heard that some do this, some don't. Some say it's bad for corns. What do you guys think?

I've heard of people using supplements to help an animal recover or to help with laying but I don't think most keepers do it as a regular practice beyond that. Whole prey is quite enough for nutritional needs.

Heck, we used to provide vitamin and mineral supplements with every meal. Mixture of multivitamins, minerals, and calcium. Every animal, every meal, from babies to full adults.

Point of the matter is that snakes in captivity are not going to get the same nutrients from the mice you feed them that they would from the mice they catch in the wild. Mice will nibble on just about everything. Everything in their gut also gets digested by the snake when the mouse meets an untimely end curious about what the flickering snake tongue is. What do the mice you feed your snake have in their gut? Well, likely mouse chow. Period.

Do you think baby snakes might need a boost in calcium (along with vitamin D3) when growing up? Do you think that the adult females might need that boost too when they are bred and developing eggs?

When I was in the business, I heard from a number of people complaining that their animals would suffer an apparent slow decline over the years. Mine never suffered that fate. Did you know that when a female is developing eggs that if she does not have enough calcium in her blood stream, it HAS to come from somewhere, or else you get eggs with insufficiently formed shells. Usually that "somewhere" is her own skeletal structure. And the damage will be cumulative. And along the same line, feeding an animal a diet insufficient of the vitamins and nutrients it needs (humans included) will cause a cumulative decline in health over time.

Heck, I even gave the mice that I fed to the snakes vitamin supplements. Healthy food is, well, HEALTHY food, I would think.

As for corn snakes not "needing" vitamin supplements, well maybe they do or maybe they don't. I know what my opinion is on that matter. So let me ask you this. Do you think that maybe diet is important to animals? Do you think you are providing everything your captives need in their diet without supplements? Suppose the only thing you had to eat for your entire life was peanut butter sandwiches. Do you think that would be healthy for you? Do you think you would live longer or not quite as long as you would like on a fixed diet of that nature? What do you think?

Do you think I thought it important to the health of my animals? Take a guess....

BTW, I am moving this thread to the Health Issues/Feeding Problems forum where I believe it will be better placed.

Originally Posted by Rich Z

Heck, we used to provide vitamin and mineral supplements with every meal. Mixture of multivitamins, minerals, and calcium. Every animal, every meal, from babies to full adults.

Point of the matter is that snakes in captivity are not going to get the same nutrients from the mice you feed them that they would from the mice they catch in the wild. Mice will nibble on just about everything. Everything in their gut also gets digested by the snake when the mouse meets an untimely end curious about what the flickering snake tongue is. What do the mice you feed your snake have in their gut? Well, likely mouse chow. Period.

Do you think baby snakes might need a boost in calcium (along with vitamin D3) when growing up? Do you think that the adult females might need that boost too when they are bred and developing eggs?

When I was in the business, I heard from a number of people complaining that their animals would suffer an apparent slow decline over the years. Mine never suffered that fate. Did you know that when a female is developing eggs that if she does not have enough calcium in her blood stream, it HAS to come from somewhere, or else you get eggs with insufficiently formed shells. Usually that "somewhere" is her own skeletal structure. And the damage will be cumulative. And along the same line, feeding an animal a diet insufficient of the vitamins and nutrients it needs (humans included) will cause a cumulative decline in health over time.

Heck, I even gave the mice that I fed to the snakes vitamin supplements. Healthy food is, well, HEALTHY food, I would think.

As for corn snakes not "needing" vitamin supplements, well maybe they do or maybe they don't. I know what my opinion is on that matter. So let me ask you this. Do you think that maybe diet is important to animals? Do you think you are providing everything your captives need in their diet without supplements? Suppose the only thing you had to eat for your entire life was peanut butter sandwiches. Do you think that would be healthy for you? Do you think you would live longer or not quite as long as you would like on a fixed diet of that nature? What do you think?

Do you think I thought it important to the health of my animals? Take a guess....

BTW, I am moving this thread to the Health Issues/Feeding Problems forum where I believe it will be better placed.

All that Rich has said is glaringly obvious when it comes to lizard reproduction. His 4th paragraph is pretty much the long way of saying metabolic bone disease. Nutrition, though not as blatantly obvious in snakes, can be a huge slap to the face when dealing with lizards and turtles. This is especially so for your diurnal species that require the UVB/UVA lighting and proper D3 supplementation.

I pretty much had my *** handed to me last year when it came to breeding Phelsuma quadriocellata. I thought my female was doing excellent, had great endolymphatic sacs (calcium sacs), great color, great body weight (not too fat, not too thin, svelte I'd say), yet every single baby I hatched survived from only 2 weeks to 2 months.

It drove me nuts and seriously devastated me to just watch babies eating and drinking one morning and dead that afternoon with no symptoms. I've done LOTS of talking with various experienced keepers and everything has pretty much came back to mother nutrition and baby supplementation, which I thought I had dialed in.

Rich...

Did you ever chat with Damon Salceies, Joe Forks, or Brad Alexander pertaining to their thoughts on snake supplementation and incubation? Unfortunately I lost the emails and Joe shut down his private invite forum eons ago, but I know Joe and Damon were using a liquid calcium supplement injected into mice and then fed off to all snakes. Damon noticed healthier shell formation, I forget Joe and Brad's input. Damon was also going as far as catching lizards to supplement his milksnake and alterna females' diet injunction with mice. Damon and Brad also felt that we incubate North American colubrids way too warm, with both incubating various kingsnake and milk snake species in 1-gallon pickle jars at warm room temp (high 70s), that I recall supposedly resulted in larger, more robust babies, that also seemed to take to feeding better. EDIT - Of course, now that I think about it, I'd assume your contact with Joe might have been limited back in the day as he was once webmaster of a sue happy competitor of yours, sorry if that strikes a nerve.

I took last season off, save the day geckos I mentioned above, due to my grandfather passing last July and then work shuffling my schedule about due to needs of the toxicology laboratory that employees me. Some of the above I plan to test out this coming season. Sometimes it's fun to be a schooled biologist, even if getting the degree was a PITA.

Originally Posted by HerpsOfNM

All that Rich has said is glaringly obvious when it comes to lizard reproduction. His 4th paragraph is pretty much the long way of saying metabolic bone disease. Nutrition, though not as blatantly obvious in snakes, can be a huge slap to the face when dealing with lizards and turtles. This is especially so for your diurnal species that require the UVB/UVA lighting and proper D3 supplementation.

I pretty much had my *** handed to me last year when it came to breeding Phelsuma quadriocellata. I thought my female was doing excellent, had great endolymphatic sacs (calcium sacs), great color, great body weight (not too fat, not too thin, svelte I'd say), yet every single baby I hatched survived from only 2 weeks to 2 months.

It drove me nuts and seriously devastated me to just watch babies eating and drinking one morning and dead that afternoon with no symptoms. I've done LOTS of talking with various experienced keepers and everything has pretty much came back to mother nutrition and baby supplementation, which I thought I had dialed in.

Rich...

Did you ever chat with Damon Salceies, Joe Forks, or Brad Alexander pertaining to their thoughts on snake supplementation and incubation? Unfortunately I lost the emails and Joe shut down his private invite forum eons ago, but I know Joe and Damon were using a liquid calcium supplement injected into mice and then fed off to all snakes. Damon noticed healthier shell formation, I forget Joe and Brad's input. Damon was also going as far as catching lizards to supplement his milksnake and alterna females' diet injunction with mice. Damon and Brad also felt that we incubate North American colubrids way too warm, with both incubating various kingsnake and milk snake species in 1-gallon pickle jars at warm room temp (high 70s), that I recall supposedly resulted in larger, more robust babies, that also seemed to take to feeding better. EDIT - Of course, now that I think about it, I'd assume your contact with Joe might have been limited back in the day as he was once webmaster of a sue happy competitor of yours, sorry if that strikes a nerve.

I took last season off, save the day geckos I mentioned above, due to my grandfather passing last July and then work shuffling my schedule about due to needs of the toxicology laboratory that employees me. Some of the above I plan to test out this coming season. Sometimes it's fun to be a schooled biologist, even if getting the degree was a PITA.

Nope, can't recall having any such conversations with the individuals you mentioned. But then again, I just don't remember people much in my past. The name "Joe Forks" just doesn't ring any bells at all to me.

Anyway, it just seemed logical to me to give the animals supplements, so that is what I did. Back when I started in this, there really wasn't a whole lot of reference material to go to. Interesting that you mention alternas, because I had heard people having a lot of problems way back when getting the eggs to hatch or having low fertility. Never had that problem myself, but then again, I gave the alterna I was working with pretty heavy calcium supplements. I recall reading that alternas were often found in proximity to limestone ridges and it just seemed to me that they would have a lot of calcium in their natural diet. Now if I could have just gotten the babies to go readily onto pinky mice...... But they were stubbornly lizard feeders as babies, and I got tired of dealing with that. Pretty aggravating to produce 40+ gray banded kingsnakes and have every one of them be a pain in the butt about feeding.

And as for incubation temps, heck, I just incubated all my animals at room temperature, and yes, I do believe I had healthier animals as a result. Took a little longer for the eggs to hatch, but I felt that was good for them. You kind of have to just step back and think about what those eggs are going to be exposed to in nature. That is what they have evolved to expect. Yeah, there is really a wide latitude of mistakes we can make and the eggs will still hatch, but heck, why not shoot for what mother nature has already developed as what is supposed to be optimum conditions?

BTW, speaking of incubating temperatures, one interesting thing I stumbled upon when working with California kings was that when I incubated the eggs, I would get all sorts of aberrant patterns when they hatched. But once I went to room temperature, that stopped dead. All the babies were cleanly divided between banded and stripes. I heard that a lot of the sinaloan milks with aberrant patterns, at least a while back, were temperature induced. So it is kind of interesting what some relatively minor changes in environment can do for the development of young animals.

People don't seem to realize the changed environment we are forcing our captive animals to live in. They don't get direct sunlight, for the most part, so the transformation of vitamin D2 to D3 is inhibited. Unless you are taking pinky mice directly after feeding from the female mice, they really don't have any calcium to speak of, because their skeletal structure hasn't developed. So you really need to help the baby snakes out with the calcium intake, and most certainly some vitamin D3 so they can assimilate the calcium into their own skeletal structure.

Nutrition is an important topic. Heck, how many of you take vitamin supplements yourself? Connie and I have been doing that for years. I don't think it is any accident that we rarely get sick and are not on tons of medications like many people our age. I believe it DOES matter. Even to your own health.