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: