I'm late to this discussion. Better late than never, though.
One possibility is that the UV bulb used in the study did not produce sufficient light of the proper wave lengths to affect the snakes blood vitamin levels. A stronger light or longer exposure might. Have to check that paper and see how strong the artificial light is compared to sunlight.
It would be nice to get the blood levels from snakes in the wild. Who knows how the levels differ between wild snakes and captives.
A natural way to supplement the snakes' vitamin D intake would be to expose live or freshly killed rodents to raw sunlight before feeding them to the snakes. We know that rodents use sunlight to produce D3.
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