I am interested in knowing what sorts of parasites pinkies contain that can be transferred to snakes. Especially the lab mice that people tend to use to feed their reptiles.
A staggering diversity of helminth parasites. A seach through the literature I just performed brings up 850 articles on parasite infections in mice. Characterizing them would take me a few weeks to go through each article and catalogue everything. Suffice to say, some of those parasites will be host specific to mice, others would be opportunists, and the snakes may or may not be able to respond to the ones that are opportunists. In many cases that response just consists of a passive diversion of energy away from reproduction toward body maintainence to offset what the parasite takes.

As far as immune systems dealing with parasites, isn't is possible that an Indonesian snake being fed fish from other countries may be getting parasites from those fish that it's completely unaccustomed to dealing with? Wouldn't the same be true when feeding an Indonesian snake American frogs?
I am not talking about indonesian snakes now am I? You are very very good at constructing strawman arguments. Guess what, what is pretty intellectually dishonest, even if it is a skill.


I am referring to North American Garter snakes in the genus Thamnophis. If you want to get into the asian "Garters" then no, I would not recommend feeding them north american frogs. Or locally available fish. As a matter of fact, I would not recommend keeping indonesian snakes at all, or any non-captive bred exotic reptile because all it does is encourage commercial collection which has this odd tendency to wipe out populations of the slow breeding animals.

That having been said, it is up in the air. It would depend on whether or not the parasites can use the snake as a host (which, if they use american snakes as a host the answer is probably yes for a good number of them, with that number getting higher the more closely related the snakes are to eachother), whether or not the parasites are related to something the snake would otherwise see (if so, the chance of a response is fairly good, depending on chemical markers) ect.



Fish and frog parasites are not the same for all fish and frogs worldwide. For example the tapeworm Diphyllobothrium only appears in freshwater fish found mainly in temperate and subarctic regions. Are you saying Indonesian Garter Snakes are equipped to deal with this parasite?
Probably not, because they use mammals as a host, not reptiles. Though I imagine there could be an exception.

The other factor is how generalized the parasites host requirements are. Some are very very specific, others can infect just about anything.

There are very few, if any, people who have successfully breed North American treefrogs. It is very difficult (and far more work than keeping snakes).
I would argue that it is more likely that people just have not tried. Most ranids (and indeed snakes) just need to be placed in proximity to eachother and they will mate eventually. Hylids and toads are more particular, but provided they are not subject to Captive Stress (IE their environments are suitable and their breeding response is triggered) it will be some work, and take a lot of experimentation, but it could be well worth it. At least hyla cinerea will breed in polluted urban flood control canals and retention basins. If you are going to be able to breed any north american hylid, that is the one to try. Either that or pseudacris regilla which will breed in people's backyard swimming pools and has been introduced into Arizona of all places via plant nursuries and breeds in their plant-watering runoff.

Might it be more work than dealing with just the snakes? Sure. Which is why I prefaced the statement with "If you are up to it" implying that it was not an easy task. Me, I have too many snakes to not want to breed my own feeders, so I am going to try. If I fail, I have that bullfrog colony down in my lab to work with.



Do you have any references that document this? I've never heard of a wild snake that died from parasite overload. The "all the time" line is intriguing. That would imply that there's plenty of proof to show that this happens. Are there any books/papers that indicate this?
As a matter of fact, I do! Most stuff on host-parasite interactions in snakes has to do with captive collections (mostly cryptosporidium) that primarily have wild caught organisms (captive stress depresses immune function and Death from Parasites), but I did manage to find this little gem a while back. Moreover there is a lot of stuff in the garter snake literature which suggests parasite loads as a cause of mortality during overwintering. However the authors only looked at body condition and did not perform any histology or do a necropsy.

Mdsen, T., Ujvari, B., Olsson, M. 2005. Old Pythons Stay Fit; Effects of Haematozoan Infections on Life History Traits of a Large Tropical Predator. Oecologica, 142(3):407-412

Abstract: We document the impact of blood parasite infections caused by Hepatozoon sp. on water python (Liasis fuscus) life history traits such as growth rates, condition, reproductive output and survival. Individual snakes maintained similar among-year parasite loads. Hepatozoon infections affected python growth rate, i.e. snakes suffering from high infection levels exhibited significantly slower growth compared to individuals with low parasite loads. Our results suggest that the parasites also affected the pythons' nutritional status ( condition), as snakes with low condition scores suffered from higher parasite infection levels than snakes with high scores. Furthermore, our data suggest that parasitaemia may affect female reproductive output, as reproductive female pythons harboured lower parasite loads compared to non-reproductive adult females. High levels of parasite infections also affected juvenile python survival, as recaptured snakes harboured significantly lower parasiteparasite loads in larger/ older pythons were lower compared to younger snakes, suggesting that only snakes harbouring lower levels of parasitaemia were able to survive to old age. We suggest that a possible cause for the opposing results regarding parasite prevalence and host age may be due to different levels of extrinsic mortality rates and longevity. Long-lived organisms, such as water pythons, may invest relatively more into crucial self-maintenance functions such as parasite loads compared to non-recaptured yearling pythons. In our study area, water python have very few natural predators and, hence, experience low mortality rates and commonly reach an age of > 15 years. In contrast to results obtained in other studies, defence, compared to short-lived organisms.