I have kept many and I find that they love both nightcrawlers and small goldfish, but I find that garters under a foot in length often refuse to eat in captivity. Considering this you may want to let it go and find a slightly bigger one.
Well, I always used soil from my yard since it compacted well so it wasn't dusty, I would think that eco earth would work as long as it was wet and pressed down and allowed to dry so it wasn't so loose.
If you just got it over the weekend I'd wait a week before offering food. The snake needs to settle into his new home before he's comfortable enough to eat.
I've had many, many Garter, Ribbon and Water Snakes, and I have never, ever, ever known one to show the slightest interest in a cricket, ESPECIALLY a dead cricket! Unless you scent a pinkie mouse with fish oils, it's not going to touch that, either. Garter Snakes naturally feed on earthworms and small aquatic vertebrates, especially fish and frogs. You can condition one to eat pinkies, and later, small adult mice, by scenting them with fish. There is another thread on here recently started by someone who'd found a Garter, in which I describe how to go about conditioning a Garter or Water Snake to accept rodents. You do not need to cut up the rodents, either. Unless it's really tiny(and this is probably one of last year's babies), it should be able to swallow a day-old pinkie, but in any case, once it settles down, earthworms will do just fine.
I've heard that as far as feeding fish to other fish is concerned, fish from bait stores are generally healthier than goldfish and rosy reds. I'm sure they're healthier for snakes too.
ya i will wait till everything around my house drys up. until then he will be on eco earth. it should only be for a week. and he wont be eating
Is that all carps or just certain types of carps, if you know? First I thought it was all fish but then looked it up it saying carp and goldfish. Do you have any list perhaps? Can you break it down by cooking the fish (going away from using the fish as snake food but rather other animals)?
Thanks for the link!
Rosy reds are a color variant of fathead minnow. Fathead minnows are in the same family as carp and goldfish(Cyprinidae), so I'd be careful with them if I were you.
I don't feed fish from the pet store or bait store. My Water Snakes and Garters eat "human-grade" fish from either the supermarket or fish market. They have no trouble at all eating strips of Salmon and Tilapia that have been sprinkled with a vitamin/calcium powder supplement for reptiles. I can shop for their food at the same time I shop for mine, which is just about as easy as buying cat or dog food at the store. Just use scissors or a really sharp knife to cut the fist into appropriately-sized strips and flop it about in front of the snake with forceps. That, combined with the earthworms, should provide a balanced diet, though like I said in another thread, it's easy to switch them over to pinkies using the fish-scenting technique I described.
