The Cold Blooded News

The Newsletter of the Colorado Herpetological Society

Volume 28, Number 2; February, 2001

Overweight Herps

Reprinted from the New Mexico Herpetological Society Newsletter, Vol.37, No.4, Oct-Dec 2000. Originally published in Herp Talk, Aug. 2000.

Researchers at the Zurich Zoo have recently put their giant Galapagos tortoises on a diet. Studies showed that the animals in the zoo were up to 10 times as heavy as their wild counterparts! It is hoped the new diet with more fiber and less fat (sound familiar?) will slow the growth rate as well as improve the health of the animals. An adult Galapagos tortoise can weigh 5,000 times its birth weight! (NMHM Ed. Note. Most herpers would do well to pay a bit more attention to the feeding schedule of their charges. Many captive herps end up obese.)

A recent article in a well-known herp newsletter advised feeding kingsnakes one to three mice, once a week. This kind of routine can easily end up with a kingsnake or cornsnake with a body much heavier than normal. Some snakes are very active and need to be fed at short intervals [garter snakes, green snakes, indigo snakes, and water snakes]. On the other end of the scale are the pythons and boas, who are typically lethargic, and many species should only be fed once a month as adults. The cornsnakes and kingsnakes fall in between with most adults doing fine with a feeding every other week. Of course, all of this is highly dependent upon the size of prey fed to the snake. Rapid growth is not necessarily good.