Garter Reproduction

[John1982]

After a day of family, turkey, and glorious daytime napping, figured I'd post a couple updates on stuff I've neglected to share. This year was my first for producing California red-sided garters(T. s. infernalis) and thought I'd include a few pictures and tidbits for folks interested in checking them out. I hope everybody enjoyed their day of thanksgiving.

The first time I noticed the male starting to court the female(January) they were still roughly the same size. This changed rather rapidly as the female's appetite increased exponentially while the male's curbed. Throughout the following months, the female would eat 2-3 small meals per week and still give me the "starving stare" on off days. The male was more interested in getting dragged around the enclosure locked onto the female and would only eat about once every other week:



and then here's the female, ready to pop(July):



It was a small litter, with 6 healthy young, 1 runt that expired shortly after, several stillborns and a few slugs. I keep my adults in a bioactive enclosure so the bugs were having a field day cleaning up all the gooey mess. I removed the stillborns to use as feeders for some of my other critters. Here's one of the babies, just a few minutes old:



The youngsters were started out in a communal group, also bioactive with isopods and springtails to aid in cleanup. I'd offer them a small dish with chopped up pinky mice and earthworms every few days. Each feeding I'd use less worms and they were taking only chopped pinkies within a week or two. Here are some of them at 1 month in age. Already growing like crazy and starting to color up:



Just shy of 4 months old now for the next few pictures:

[Ba11er]

Garter snakes are awesome especially the California red sided. Updates on these would be great, thanks to posting !

[Prognathodon]

Adorable little noodles!


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk Pro

[Ax01]

beautiful snakes and clutch! they look very exotic and almost venomous.

also are these the same Garter Snakes that are on the sides of some U-Hauls? i think they're the same except the ones on the trucks are a Canadian locality. (i picked out the snake truck specifically for my move over the summer)

[AbsoluteApril]

Gorgeous and great job with them!
My favorite species of garter, they are so beautiful.

[BallPythonWannaBe]

Beautiful! You said you keep them in a Bioactive setep? How hard is that?

[John1982]

also are these the same Garter Snakes that are on the sides of some U-Hauls? i think they're the same except the ones on the trucks are a Canadian locality.

Those are T. s. parietalis on the u-hauls.

[John1982]

You said you keep them in a Bioactive setep? How hard is that?

Besides feeding the snakes and changing their water dish, I have very little maintenance. Once per week I water the plant and a couple times a year I'll turn the soil a bit to keep it loose.