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RE: Caring for Feeders: A Less Glamorous Responsibility of a Zookeeper
You go through great lengths to keep the animals healthy. I bet if I were a snake and only fed frozen mice I might go off my feed and want something else. Does that make me fickle?
Haha it just makes you human. Most snakes feed predominantly on rodents, so they are the main food source used. Some species do feed on birds, eggs, amphibians, other reptiles and even other snakes, but we tend to avoid those foods as they seem very content with mice. We actually keep some species specifically because they like mice; for example, the native eastern hognose does poorly in captivity because they only eat toads, so we display the closely related and similar looking western hognose because they thrive in captivity on a diet of mice.
Some of our snakes (cottonmouths and garter snakes) are also fed a diet of fish and worms to simulate their natural food source.
Good to know. You have a very interesting job.