The Wall's book has a noticable European feel to it, although I have no idea where he is from. They have much different husbandry philosophies than us.



Regarding the calcium dusting, the idea behind it is that wild prey items have much more calcium than rodents raised in captivity. Moreover, there is a notion that they recieve more bio-available calcium in nature due to eating a variety of prey.



I don't know how much I buy this, however, as I would suspect that snakes in the wild are more likely to catch young prey with less than completely developed bones.



Captive rodents do tend to show osteoporosis to some degree, presumably due to their sedentary habits, so who knows?



Regarding the full spectrum lighting, I do suspect there are benefits but that they are much less significant in heliophilic lizards, for example. I gather there are foreign language papers in Europe providing some support to this idea. Wish I could find translations.



And on a similar note, nocturnal geckos have apparent benefits from exposure to UV light. After all they are not all going deep underground during the day. So I'm not so sure the crepuscular argument holds up.



I'll leave with one last comment. I got a tour of the preserved (i.e. wet) collection at the Field Museum in Chicago. I got to talk to the head PhD guy for hours, it was a great experience.



He pointed out that any decent comparative anatomist could tell the difference between a snake raised in captivity vs. one that was captured in the field. I believe the main difference was bone development - the captive specimens were much "worse".



Now whether calcium supplementation or full spectrum lighting would have any positive effect on this is another question. For all we know it could make the situation worse. That would be a bit counter-intuitive, but we really don't know.
-----
Current snakes:



0.2 Gonyosoma oxycephala - (Silver/Yellow)



3.3 Gonyosoma oxycephala - (Green)



2.1 Gonyosoma janseni - (Black)



3.3 Gonyosoma janseni - (Black & Tan)

[ Hide Replies ]

• Do you do this? - fliptop, Thu Mar 10 18:47:12 2005
• RE: Do you do this? - crtoon83, Thu Mar 10 19:03:13 2005
• RE: Do you do this? - Kevin Saunders, Thu Mar 10 19:09:52 2005
• RE: Do you do this? - chris_harper2, Thu Mar 10 21:02:25 2005
• typo... - chris_harper2, Thu Mar 10 21:30:36 2005
• RE: Do you do this? - Elaphefan, Sun Mar 13 13:18:40 2005
• RE: Do you do this? - fliptop, Sun Mar 13 18:27:48 2005
• RE: Do you do this? - Elaphefan, Mon Mar 14 16:41:42 2005