"Your experience breeding kinked snakes and not getting kinked babies is a powerful anecdotal argument against the inbreeding=kinked babies theory."



OR...



it could mean that there is more than once cause of kinking.



For instance diet could easily be a factor. I've been thinking for years about calcium transport in snakes and whether the standard captive diet of laboratory-raised mice is optimal. The idea is a little involved but it starts like this. In nature snakes frequently bask, particularly in the spring. We perceive this as for warming but could they also be generating vitamin D3 to boost their ability to absorb calcium needed for egg production and sperm motility? Tying this to diet, by the time spring comes around, wild prey species (mice and rats) have pretty much scavenged all available seed. What they haven’t eaten has sprouted and so they are left with a more "green" diet until new seed crops are produced. Just so happens, green diets are rich in beta-carotenes another group of precursor compounds needed to metabolize calcium. As it turns out nature might be providing rodents, gut loaded with critical compounds just when they would be needed most to start off the next generation.

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