Chicks Are FINE To Feed To Snakes, Here's Why!

Should You REALLY Feed Your Snake Variety? Well I compared the nutritional content of different snake prey items for those of you wondering if you should feed your snake variety.

You may be wondering if you should vary your snakes’ diets or not. I compared the nutritional contents of 3 prey items. What I found made me restructure my snakes’ diets. By the end of this video, you should have a better understanding about if it is bad to deviate or should you vary the diet, or somewhere in between.
To start we must define what minimum levels we are looking for. Here are some rough recommendations:
There were other sources but their data seemed to be from these two so they were excluded.
The question then is what prey items meet these values ORR is there a problem feeding things like chicks?

I have taken three different reputable sources, worked out an average across the 3 of them to give us a general overview of what the nutritional content of mice, rats and chicks are. Its worth mentioning here that the diet of the rodents will affect the values. Some of these sources used multiple suppliers in their sampling so we can be safe in using these general values for the purposes of this video.
I will just stipulate that I haven’t included things like quail because some of the data is incomplete and I wouldn’t have been able to do some of the calculations in this video.
So lets start with the adult mouse, 3 different sources with an average percentage of calcium at 3.22% and an average 2.5% phosphorus, by dividing the calcium by the phosphorus that gives us a Ca:P ratio of 1.3:1. Now the requirements of most vertebrates is 1:1 to 2:1. So this meets requirements.
Average Crude protein of 57.2%, the requirements are 30 – 50 so this meets recommendations.
Theres no recommended values for fat but you may notice that the mouse had on average the highest crude fat % at 26.6%, with the chick lower at 22.5% and rat 17.7%.
Vitamin A ranged from 150k iu to 578,272iu/kg. Now this is exceptionally high when compared to other prey items listed in sources. But with only 5,000 to 10,000iu/kg stated as required its safe to say it surpasses this. Note that there is only one source for vit A. Because this is so high I have a creeping suspicion that there may have been some carotenoids in the gut of the mouse influencing this result. The paper does not state if the rodents were fasted to empty stomachs prior to analysis or not. But the paper does recognise that high amounts of carotenoids in rodent diets leads to high vit A hepatic liver storage so you would assume that this would have been a consideration in their methods although not stated. So make of that what you will.
Vit E was 100, half of what is recommended however it is plausible that recommendation may be too high for snakes as many of the prey items listed by one source fell short yet snakes have been maintained on these for decades without signs of deficiency.
And it met the requirements for all trace minerals listed.
The rat had an average calcium percentage of 4.7% and P of 3.06% with a Ca:P ratio of 1.5:1. Which is higher than that of the mouse so falls within the acceptable range for vertebrates. They had an average protein % of 57.2. Vit A is listed at roughly 150 thousand. Vit e was 139.2 . Then all listed trace minerals met requirements.

Now the chick, the food item people claim is inefficient.
Average ca of 1.83%, p of 1.3% with a ratio of 1.4:1 giving it a marginally higher ratio than the average adult mouse. So claims that chicks would not have suitable calcium to phosphorus ratios fall short it would seem. Protein on average was 65.8, which was higher than both rats and mice. Vitamin data is deficient for chicks. The chicks meets all trace requirements apart from manganese, Arbuckle 2010 proposes that the mn levels found in the data may be unusually low for doc’s or that the requirements using borrowing knowledge of mammalian carnivore requirements for mn is too high and that snakes may require less. Arbuckle states that snakes raised by him on an almost exclusive doc diet had typical growth and body condition. This would also suggest that vit A and E levels in chicks are of suitable levels.

Now hopefully you have an answer to Should You REALLY Feed Your Snake Variety?

Sources:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/251886278_Nutrient_Composition_of_Whole_Vertebrate_Prey_Excluding_Fish_Fed_in_Zoos
https://www.msdvetmanual.com/management-and-nutrition/nutrition-exotic-and-zoo-animals/nutrition-in-reptiles?fbclid=IwAR2uuW72emK4bwue9pGBwW715ewcPo7UIOl6opLKmn6dmFCbOZvFEsk-58w
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/45183745_Suitability_of_day-old_chicks_as_food_for_captive_snakes


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