I often wonder what are some of the underlying causes of stillborn, deformed/kinked babies, high amounts of jellybeans and etc. Over the many, many clutches of garters I have seen born I have never seen a kinked baby in the flesh yet! And it's just weird to me because I see that they occur once or twice a season in some other's collections but I still have never seen one!

I don't intentionally provide any of my snakes with UV lighting, and only the ones in certain enclosures get any direct lighting on their cage at all. My snakeroom gets rather hot with only a few bulbs and the rack system running. I don't give my gravid females extra heat and I don't allow them to over eat. Some garters do eat rodents in the wild, and some are much more aquatic but overall, they are all opportunistic and have a varied diet to some extent and that is why I continue to vary the diet. My garters appear to "enjoy" the variations anyways!