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Just a question

One thing im pretty certain of is you take a well fed, well taken care food item and you freeze it, something is lost. How much experience do you have feeding live vs. frozen? I bred freeder mice for about ten years. It wasnt until about a year ago that the bulk of their diet was frozen because i simply dont have the space anymore. I see a difference in my animals that had the majority of live prey vs. frozen. I just had a friend over recently and said "look, these were fed live and these were fed frozen" they saw a difference too. If i can do some research and figure out vitamins are lost i can put just lost vitamins back. I bred garter snakes for 10 years or so but had to use vitamin b cuz they eat fish.
 
Yes, I'd love to do more research for you.

http://ucce.ucdavis.edu/files/datastore/234-779.pdf - This may be about fruits and vegetables, but freezing doesn't cause a great deal of nutrient loss in the short term (and some of that is due to the blanching before hand with vegetables) but does have some decent loss long-term (They mention 1 year and older at one point).

Seems to be lots of scientific plant articles, but not much on meat so far-

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/fd90/0931812081bff85f304a557906852b9add90.pdf

Nutrient loss depends on type of vegetable, particular nutrient (carotenoids, vit c, phenols, thiamin, etc), cultivar of the species of fruit or veggie (can be very large differences) Please pay close attention to the length of storage as detailed starting page 18, where significant loss in some veggies is seen at time spans of 1 to 2 1/2 years.

My snakes have been fed f/t from the get go. I did notice some changes when I had purchased too many feeders and had some in the freezer for up to 12 months. I now space my purchases to use up most of my stock by 3 or 4 months.
 
Also, if you were having to supplement vitamin B for your garters (were you exclusively feeding fish?.....) that means you were feeding them fish rich in thiaminase, which is a known issue and those species of fish should be avoided.

It's also not easy to just 'put vitamins back' when you don't know the actual quantity in milligrams, or rather, micrograms lost (this will vary by species and by length of time frozen and even by individual) and you don't know the required dosages for those vitamins and minerals for a corn snake. You would be blindly guessing, and very likely overdosing your snake. Which leads to health problems.
 
So you already knew that nutrient loss in frozen food takes significant lengths of time and therefore nutrient supplement is not required? You already knew that you shouldn't have been feeding thiaminase rich food to your garters (but did?). You already knew that you don't know the right dosing for a snake and could cause them harm with overdosing (but want to do it anyway)?
 
So....i have found out that freezing mice kills all b vitamins. You csn supplement or feed 1 live mouse a month
 
I am only asking this for personal growth and if bhb has done this I will look into that
And next time I see Dr Rossi I will ask him his opinion on the matter I am not trying to start a big upheaval here I was just curious and I understand that snakes get most of their vitamins from their prey just like alligators and that is why it is not a good idea to feed gators chicken parts
I do find it odd that a lizard that is in captivity that you mainly feed it the same diet that it would get in the wild still needs vitamins and yes I know that they get some vitamins from sunlight which can be made indoors they still need vitamins

And btw twolunger I have always loved your posts


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Brian covers most of the questions raised, if you watch the videos. I really don't care if some of you don't want to use supplements. I'm not telling you how to feed your snakes. I can only tell the OP that I have used them for many years and when used correctly there are no harmful effects. None. No snake will ever die if you use vitamins SPARINGLY. I use them every 3rd feeding by dusting lightly on the rear end of the prey item. My son and I have raised thousands of snakes and never lost ONE due to vitamin usage. However, raising thousands of snakes does not make us experts. Hence my comment that quantity production does not make an expert. I still have found no article from a scientific source that states that using "reptile" vitamins judiciously is harmful to snakes. I don't want to read articles about overdosing, that's not what I'm talking about. Show me any article where a test was conducted using vitamins such as Nature Zone, and any snake was harmed. There are none. Bushsnake is correct, I raised my own rodents for years and prekilled live are noticeably better than any frozen. Even with prekilled live I still used supplements. If you feel that supplements shouldn't be
necessary I can see your point, but I have my own opinion on the matter.
 
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