Articles
Garter Snakes in WinterMonday, January 7, 2008
Winter is not a time of year that people normally think about reptiles. In the northern hemisphere, at least, reptiles are out of sight during the winter months, and (at least in theory) ought to be out of mind. It’s no surprise to me, for example, that Gartersnake.info gets much less traffic during this time. And yet reptiles — and in particular snakes — can nevertheless make their presence known, even to those who don’t keep them in cages, in ways that can be baffling.
For example, once or twice each season, I get e-mails from people who encounter snakes in their basements. Usually they’re garter snakes, but not always. They have two questions for me: What is this snake doing down there, and what do I do with it? Or garter snake keepers write in to ask what to do with a snake that has mysteriously stopped eating.
Garter snakes do not go on hiatus during the winter. Whether in the wild, in your basement by mistake, or in their cages, there is still something going on.
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You Can’t Tease-Feed a Garter SnakeWednesday, November 22, 2006
Snake feeding time at our house is always hilarious. The boas always seem to constrict their mice, which are always previously frozen and thawed, for twenty minutes before they try to eat them, and the kingsnakes I’ve had have been so stupid they occasionally bite themselves instead of the mouse. But the garter snakes have never failed to be a source of great entertainment whenever mice are dropped in their cages.
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The Narcisse Snake Dens in the Off-SeasonTuesday, September 19, 2006
The Narcisse snake dens, just an hour and a half north of Winnipeg, Manitoba, are rightly viewed as a natural wonder: every spring, tens of thousands of Red-sided Garter Snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis parietalis) emerge from hibernation, mate like crazy, and disperse for the summer. And you can watch them do it — at its peak, you’re quite literally tripping over snakes, there are so many of them. Over the past few decades it has slowly grown into a tourist attraction: low-profile even by Manitoba standards, it nonetheless draws visitors from around the world.
I grew up in Winnipeg and, when I was eight years old, visited the dens twice in one season. Many snake enthusiasts who have not been able to make the trip are jealous of me because of it. But I didn’t return until this year, when, to my surprise, even in the off-season the snake dens were still able to put on an impressive show.
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Telling Garter Snakes and Ribbon Snakes ApartTuesday, May 30, 2006
I get more questions about ribbon snakes than I do about anything else on this site, and I suspect that this article gets more attention than the others do. It seems to me, then, that I should write some more about ribbon snakes, even if I don’t keep any in captivity at the moment. (It’s too hard to get a reliable supply of feeder fish where I live.)
Being able to tell the difference between a garter snake and a ribbon snake is one question that crops up among field naturalists. In much of eastern North America, Common Garter Snakes, Thamnophis sirtalis, and Eastern Ribbon Snakes, Thamnophis sauritus are the only two species of Thamnophis found in the wild. Telling one from the other is therefore of some interest.1
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The Thirty-First Garter SnakeThursday, May 18, 2006
Taxonomy waits for no one. A decade after the publication of the definitive reference on garter snakes — The Garter Snakes: Evolution and Ecology by Rossman, Ford and Seigel, which listed 30 species of garter snake — there have been a few changes to the taxonomy set out in that book.
Those changes that have taken place among the species north of the U.S.-Mexico border are relatively easy to follow; they’re well documented online. Thanks to the Center for North American Herpetology’s web site, we know that Boundy and Rossman’s proposal to synonymize the San Francisco Garter Snake (Thamnophis sirtalis tetrataenia) with T. s. infernalis and rearrange the west coast subspecies of the Common Garter Snake has been rejected, and that the validity of both the Blue-striped Garter Snake (T. s. similis) and the Blue-striped Ribbon Snake (T. sauritus nitae) — both originally described by Rossman — has been challenged, as have most of the subspecies of the Western Terrestrial Garter Snake (Thamnophis elegans).1 On the other hand, a new subspecies of the Pacific Coast Aquatic Garter Snake (Thamnophis atratus), the Diablo Garter Snake (T. a. zaxanthus), was described in 1999.
But because Mexican herpetofauna is handled separately (and not as prominently), it’s easier for amateurs to miss taxonomic changes in species south of the U.S.-Mexico border. In 2000, a 31st species of garter snake, Rossman’s Garter Snake (Thamnophis rossmani), was described; I wondered about it for years before I finally read the article that named it.
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Feeding Earthworms: Red Wigglers vs. NightcrawlersFriday, May 12, 2006
Feeding earthworms to garter snakes is complicated by the fact that there are, broadly speaking, two kinds of earthworms, only one of which is safe to use.
Red wigglers (Eisenia foetida) are the worms used in vermicomposting, so they’re plentiful and easy to raise in captivity. But if the prospect of a limitless supply of worms fed on garbage scraps sounds too good to be true, it is. You can’t use them.
People are disappointed to hear this, and they ask why, particularly since they may have used red wigglers without incident as food for aquatic turtles (as one friend told me), or have managed to feed them to snakes without any problems.
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The Seven Rules of Raising Baby Garter SnakesWednesday, May 3, 2006
Few people are crazy enough to breed garter snakes and raise the babies, but more than a few of us have unexpectedly been handed the task of raising a large number of baby garter snakes. We may, for example, have been handed a “rescued” garter snake that turns out to be very, very pregnant, which then surprises you one day with dozens of her offspring slithering around her cage.
Oh great, you think. Now what? Suddenly you’re faced with having to look after a whole bunch of little snakes. The sheer number of them can make that a very intimidating situation. And raising baby garter snakes isn’t the same as raising a litter or two of corn snakes. Garter snakes don’t eat mice, you think, and they’re too small for pinkies anyway — how are you going to feed them all?
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Differences Between Male and Female Garter SnakesMonday, September 12, 2005
One of the questions I get most frequently, particularly from prospective garter snake buyers, is whether there is any difference between males and females.
For most snakes, the sex doesn’t matter much, unless you’re trying to breed them (or, conversely, trying to avoid breeding them, if you want to house two in the same cage and therefore want them both to be the same sex). With garter snakes, though, there are a few differences; some of them may matter to you.
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Raising Baby Garter Snakes: Some Personal ObservationsThursday, May 5, 2005
The herpetocultural literature on the raising of young garter snakes is surprisingly scant. Apart from some issues of diet, the care of adult garter snakes is little different from that of any other medium-sized North American colubrid. Books on the subject either deal with neonate garter snake care in very general terms, or treat it as similar to that of other snakes. But this is not the case. There are some definite differences in the care of newborn garter snakes, especially in terms of feeding and housing. As a result, when my garter snakes started breeding in the spring of 2001, I was not prepared for some of the surprises their offspring had in store for me.
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Resetting a Garter Snake’s AppetiteSunday, February 6, 2005
Garter snakes that have been trained to eat mice can be some of the most ravenous feeders ever seen in captivity. Some of mine, for example, have been so eager to eat mice that they’ll launch themselves towards you when you open the cage at feeding time, or grab the mouse before it even hits the substrate.
So it can be surprising when that enthusiastically feeder suddenly stops feeding in the fall. When that happens, it usually means that the snake is preparing to hibernate. And if you have the facilities for hibernation, that’s certainly an option. But for those who don’t have such facilities, or don’t know how to do it (see the Hibernation chapter of the Care section), a snake with a normally healthy appetite that suddenly stops feeding can be cause for concern, if not outright panic.
If hibernation is not an option for you, or if you want your snake to keep feeding over the winter, you may want to try changing its diet.
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For RingletWednesday, December 8, 2004
Five years and 5 months prior to December 24, 2003, my wife Christine and I caught a gravid eastern garter snake near Bancroft, Ontario. Ten days after her capture, she produced 20 offspring. As is typical with most groups of animal young, they exhibited a wide range of personality traits — some were passive, some aggressive, some secretive, some bold, etc. Some of the brood also ate readily while others refused food.
After some debate we decided to keep the “pick of the litter.” We returned the mother and siblings to the wild. We named our choice “Ringlet” as he often curled upon a single finger and rested there for what seemed like an eternity. He began feeding on guppies and gradually worked his way up the usual garter food chain.
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The San Francisco Garter Snake in CanadaFriday, June 4, 2004
Philippe Blais, a physician who lives in the suburbs of Montreal, works with a number of different herps, from Uromastyx to Tiger Rat Snakes, and from box turtles to False Water Cobras. But without question he is best known for his work with garter snakes, in particular, the “flame” morph of Eastern Garter Snake, Thamnophis sirtalis sirtalis, which he pioneered; they are now frequently referred to as “Blais flames.” His article in The Vivarium about this bright-red variant rekindled interest in garter snakes.
One of Phil’s new projects was on display at his table at the Metro Toronto Reptile Show last October: San Francisco Garter Snakes, Thamnophis sirtalis tetrataenia. His breeding colony produced a few litters this year, and his display had more than one herper cursing their inability to meet their high price tag. (Phil sells them for $1,600 a pair — on par with their European price and justifiable given their scarcity, but easily the highest price ever commanded for a natricine snake in Canada.)
Jonathan Crowe conducted this interview by e-mail in early December 2000.
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Questions About Ribbon Snakes in CaptivityFriday, June 4, 2004
When I first had the idea to write a short article about keeping ribbon snakes in captivity, my plan was to explain why ribbon snakes were a poor “beginner” snake in spite of their low price at pet stores. I would have based that argument on the herpetocultural literature on ribbon snakes and on our own experience with our single Western Ribbon Snake, which to date has made for a less than satisfactory captive. But things have gotten a bit more complicated since then, and now I’m left with more questions about ribbon snakes than answers. Which is probably a good thing.
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Some Notes on Wandering Garter Snakes, Thamnophis elegans vagransThursday, June 3, 2004
Wandering Garter Snakes (Thamnophis elegans vagrans) will never win any ophidian beauty contests. They are essentially gray or grayish-brown snakes with a black checkered pattern and three cream-coloured stripes (occasionally the side stripes are not visible). To hobbyists enamoured of tricoloured milk snakes or mountain kingsnakes, they must seem quite drab, though their appearance might appeal to those of us who appreciate subtler, more subdued patterns (such as Baird’s Rat Snakes or Gopher Snakes). But whatever you think of their appearance, these are nevertheless very interesting snakes. They are reckoned as being one of the best (if not the best) garter snakes to keep in captivity, and they are probably the least garter-like garter snake north of Mexico.
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Domestic Mice as Food for Butler’s Garter Snakes, Thamnophis butleriThursday, June 3, 2004
Nowhere in the recent herpetological or herpetocultural literature regarding Butler’s Garter Snakes, Thamnophis butleri, are rodents referred to as a potential food source, either in captivity or in the wild.1 Field studies have confirmed that earthworms make up the overwhelming proportion of a Butler’s Garter Snake’s diet, followed by leeches; laboratory studies have shown that they also react to toads, small frogs, red-backed salamanders and small fish (Catling and Freedman 1980, Rossman, Ford and Seigel 1996).
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Understanding Garter Snakes Through Their DietsThursday, June 3, 2004
Garter snakes are known for eating a variety of endothermic prey, such as amphibians (especially frogs and toads), fish, earthworms, and even slugs and leeches. But it’s more complicated than that. Several garter snake species specialize on only a few of these prey items and refuse the others; other species will eat all of these and more. For example, some people may not know that a few species will eat small mammals or birds, which makes it possible to feed them mice in captivity. Not only that, but the Western Terrestrial Garter Snake (Thamnophis elegans) has an exceptionally broad range of prey preferences: it also likes to eat reptiles, including snakes (so they must be kept separately in captivity). Then there are the exceptions, like the Mexican Alpine Blotched Garter Snake (Thamnophis scalaris), which is known only to eat lizards. So it’s a mistake to assume that all garters eat the same kind of food. It’s important to pay close attention to what garters eat, especially if you’re thinking about keeping one in captivity. What I will do in this article is shed a little light on the complexity and variation in garter snakes’ diets, both in the wild and in captivity.
A Gathering of Garter Snakes
The Garter Snakes: Evolution and Ecology
