[Cazador]

Hi Gerry,
You might get a bit of a sticker shock when you go to purchase 8 garter snakes. You'll probably end up paying $15-20 each for the most common types, but I've seen them for as little as $5 (it's rare, though). Okay... once in a while you see them offered for free but that's even less common.

People can eat crickets, too, but neither people nor garter snakes can digest their exoskeleton, which is made of chitin. The snakes will get whatever nutrition they can out of whatever they can digest within the cricket, but as you know, they can't chew their food to break the chitin apart and take full advantage of the cricket's nutrients. Kitkat offered a very good experimental idea, which would reinforce this concept for you. I suspect, however, that you'd have to change the diet of the experimental group that's eating crickets at some point because of failure to thrive.

The only thing I'd modify about this design is that you'll need more than one snake per diet because individual snakes (like individual everything) grow at different rates. Some individuals will simply eat more food than others and grow faster... even if they're on the same diet. Others may eat the exact same amount as its neighbor, but it will spend a different amount of time under the heat lamp (or spend more energy running around... exercising). Look at all the men around you. They're not all the same size or shape. You'll have to describe each experimental group in terms of means, or averages. If you can talk about standard deviations, that's even better.

Rick