SebastiansAnimals;
Dodgy videos of my animals on You Tube, a bit of a mix to give you an idea of what I like.

Basically, I like everything!

Sebastian
April 2012

A quick invert update!

As Ive been a bit busy lately I haven't had time to post about a couple of new additions, a small weaver ant Oecophylla smaragdina colony arrived just over a week ago and 3 small paper wasp colonies Polistes dominulus the day after that.

The weavers are from an online store called My ant shop http://www.myantshop.com/ who I have used a few times and can't rate highly enough and you will doubtless be hearing lots more about in the future, while the Polistes came from a friend who was collecting for a project in Spain and gave me 3 small colonies.

The weavers are great, very active and collecting food within minutes of being released, the wasps are dead...

They lasted a week and seemed to be doing well, taking food from tweezers, no obvious aggression and tending 2 out of the 3 nests which were altogether in a large plastic container. But then after five day's I found 2 (out of around 10 animals) dead, the next day all but one were dead on the floor. It 's unlikely to be dramatic temperature fluctuations as the weavers and a Stegodyphus sp. colony in the same area are all fine. 

And although I have not seen any aggression I cant help feeling it may have played a part but if that is so, why so sudden? Perhaps putting the 3 nests together did create tensions, and even though they are probably related colonies the close proximity was just too much?

The person who gave me them has others which are doing well with just an occasional death here and there and has offered me another colony, perhaps I’ll try and work out what I did wrong before I take them though, and then I'll keep them separately....

I have also added another nest chamber to my leaf cutter ant colony Acromyrmex octospinosus, I had been told that they normally stick in one chamber but will move around quite readily, I have added the second partly to help increase the colony size but also to see if they will just get up and move.

And here are some cute pictures of newts to cheer me up.

Tylototriton verrucosus

With thanks to Jane Hallam for taking the verrucosus pictures.

Feeding live food, justified or not?

I have offered live food to many species; mainly invertebrates but sometimes live fish (and in my youth live mice). I do not like doing it, especially with vertebrates but even with the inverts, but I am sure I will have to make the decision again soon.
If you go onto Youtube and type in nearly any predatory species of animal, you will normally find someone, somewhere, feeding something alive, to that species, and very frequently, in my opinion it doesn’t seem justifiable or necessary. The law in the UK doesn’t actually state that its illegal to feed live vertebrate prey (please let me know if this is wrong and we can then try and prosecute the people who feed live mice to their snakeheads!). It does state that its a crime to cause unnecessary suffering, although this can be taken in many ways. Its basically not nice to feed live food if you don't need to (again, in my opinion).
Although some animals have a feeding response that relies on movement (many frogs, preying mantis etc.) many species can easily be weaned onto dead food, if the keeper wants to.

I have kept a few species that have been very difficult to get feeding and have offered live prey to begin with.

The worst species I had that I couldn’t wean onto dead food were Acrochordus granulatus, the banded file snake (please see separate post and photos to come on this species) These were wild caught animals that were in very poor condition and didn’t eat on their own for some time and had to be tube fed, even though offered live food to begin with. The two that I managed to keep alive eventually started to respond to the splashing of small fish in shallow water which seemed to stimulated their feeding response. I did managed to get one of them onto dead food but this was only on a couple of occasions as normally it would only take live fish.

In this case should we say that species shouldn’t be kept? I imagine that some individuals will move onto dead food but how many wouldn’t and how many feeder fish would be fed for this over its lifetime?

I would hope that it's an obvious fact that this species (and others like it) shouldn’t be available “off the shelf” and prospective buyers should be told all the facts about their keeping.

But they are really interesting, very pretty and if I saw them again I would be very tempted, even though I’ve lost a lot of money, a huge amount of time and been racked with guilt on this issue about them.

So the feeder fish dies so the “wanted” fish, snake or frog lives. What about the dead fish that was fed to the easy to keep species; this roach, trout, whitebait or “lance-fish” probably didn’t want to die, may not have died in a good way and, if farmed was probably fed on wild caught marine fish, that died by either suffocated amongst the bodies of other fish in the ships hold or was blast frozen while still alive and then offered in pellet form for optimum growth. (The same sort of thing that people feed their tropical fish tanks when giving flake food).

Basically, (in my opinion,) if you feed your animals any type of animal prey, dead or alive, then the prey animal has suffered to some extent.

If you feed your animal (what ever taxa) live-food (what ever taxa) you should have to at least try to justify it.

There's a species of shrimp, the amazingly beautiful harlequin shrimp that only feeds on starfish. I have seen articles saying to feed them on tropical starfish imported as tank specimens.

In a world where climate change is causing people to die, where air travel is causing seas to rise, is it really worth importing star fish as food for a species that apparently if removed, allow “problem” starfish to proliferate and could be causing coral declines?                                                                                                                                                    
However, animals dying isn’t my main problem, its why and how they die we should be focusing on. Feeding live food may be needed to kick start something feeding or just to keep it alive. I'd rather not feed live insects if I can help it as I don’t like seeing things being torn apart. I write all this because on many of my posts I’ll mention feeding live animals and I hope that this will make it obvious that I don’t feed live food because its easier or because I get a thrill from it. Even the frozen bloodworms we use died being frozen to death, just because I didn’t do it doesn’t let me off the hook. (And yes I do try and avoid eating or using animal products for myself).

There is a very strong argument that if something can't be fed on dead food then it shouldn’t be kept, and although I’d like to argue against this I do have trouble coming up with a point. And I am very good at arguing, and of course, of being a hypocrite.

As I don’t want to go about my personal views on this blog, just to say what I’ve tried to keep and how,  I will now shut up.  

Sebastian                                                                                                                                                    April 2012

Future posts...