Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hello, my name is Zach Cava and I am a Junior Biology major at Ithaca College. I am interested in doing research involving how diet affects growth rate in eastern garter snakes. For this study I will need a lot of northern redback salamanders. Does anyone know where I can order these from?

Thank you
Zach Cava

Dude, we like salamanders why would we tell you where to get them so you can feed them to your snakes?

Go to a bait shop and get some minnows if you need to feed your pet snake.

In my experience, the most easy to find and cheapest food for gartersnakes are nightcrawlers available at many gas stations/grocery stores or at the very least the nearest bait shop.

That being said, I can't think off the top of my head of a place to get cheap Red-backed Salamanders (as many herpetologists would now have you call them). Depending on your state laws, you could in theory get them wild caught since they are the most abundant vertebrate in a northeastern hardwood forest. To be perfectly honest though, I'd go with the nightcrawlers. They eat dirt and require nearly zero care to keep alive. Red-backed Salamanders need to be fed small invertebrates, require special care and environmental conditions, and much more space since they inhabit a two-dimensional world. The are also smaller than night crawlers. Lastly, you can cut a nightcrawler in half and the front will still live so if you can more precisely control the quantity given. If your snakes are small that's not a problem because you can just buy regular earthworms or "red wigglers" instead. Good luck!

Just curious, why did you decide on Red-backed Salamanders?

The reason I need red-backed salamanders is because the study would look at 3 different diets and how each diet affected growth rate in garter snakes. So, 15 snakes would be fed earthworms, 15 would be fed salamanders and 15 would be fed minnows. They will be measured and weighed each week in order to calculate growth.

-Zach

Oook. I figured it involved some sort of quantity variable rather than food types. I still don't know a place where you can just buy bulk Red-backed Salamanders... You might want to check out the kingsnake.com classifieds at the top of the screen then navigate to amphibians under the US section. I don't recall that species ever being advertised there but if you post a wanted ad then you may get a response pretty quickly. Just be sure to let them know in your ad exactly what you plan on doing and someone might be able to help you.

and ask them for a license application for a License to collect/possess. Just explain what you're doing and they'll more than likely let you collect 15 of them. THey aren't rare, so its not going to impact the populations. I know of studies being done where red-efts are fed to eastern hognose snakes....under LCP.

MH