Can a Milk Snake Eat Fish?

Cricket1234 · 02-27-17, 09:46 PM

So I have been inactive on the forum lately, and I have been trying to kind of catch up on everything. Before I post this, please remember I am not doing this out of cruelty but more for the health of my animals and for a view into the predatory behavior of snakes, as well as an interesting scientific experiment. Here it goes.....
So I have a ten gallon community tank in which I have been very proud of. But I have always had this one yellow GlowFish neon tetra that has been starving my other animals, especially my African Dwarf frog. Whenever I feed all my animals, this one fat little fish bullies all of the other fish away, even his own school. He then tries to eat almost all of the food. I try to feed him separate, but the only tank I have is strictly quarantine and I can't use it for feeding. The fish is literally (No exageration) So obese that he is the equivalent to a 700 pound person. I want to get rid of him, and nobody will take him due to his tendencies. So the idea came to me to feed my snake the fish, as I want to see a.) If the snake will constrict on live prey, and b.) how a snake would hunt in its natural environment. I would like to use a mouse I just can't deal with feeding such an intelligent mammal to a snake alive (but I envy those who are brave enough to do it) Will this make my snake sick or die? Just checking ahead of time. Thanks guys, for answering and reading my long post!

**EL Ziggy** · 02-28-17, 08:56 AM

I'm not sure if the snake would eat the fish or not but it's not something I would try. Their primary diet consists of rodents and birds so I would stick with those prey items.

akane · 02-28-17, 03:11 PM

It probably wouldn't recognize it if it's only had rodents. Know anyone with baby water snakes or various small snake species that naturally eat fish commonly?

Dwarf frogs often have to be target fed because the fish will eat all the food even when you don't have a bully and they are best fed frozen like bloodworms rather than fish flakes or pellets.

Cricket1234 · 02-28-17, 03:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by akane

It probably wouldn't recognize it if it's only had rodents. Know anyone with baby water snakes or various small snake species that naturally eat fish commonly?

Dwarf frogs often have to be target fed because the fish will eat all the food even when you don't have a bully and they are best fed frozen like bloodworms rather than fish flakes or pellets.

I understand that. I feed my Dwarf frog frog aquatic frog pellets by Zoo Med and bloodworms, but he steals the sinking pellets and when I feed it bloodworms the tetra comes and purposely scares my frog away and eats the bloodworms. I now have to feed it by hand, which is not something I like to do as it can cause stress on the other species as well as introduce contaminants to the tank. But turns out I am not feeding it to the snake, as I realized that it would mess up his feeding schedule. For now I will just continue hand feeding my dwarf frog and hope that he stops being such a nuisance.

akane · 03-01-17, 01:36 AM

I used a dropper to suck up the bloodworms and then squeeze it slowly until they stuck out the end in the water and the frogs would suck them off the end so I'd squeeze it a little more. Usually other fish will interfere even if you take away the bully though. I did actually keep some successfully in a 90g of small community fish with very heavy planting to help climb to the surface, a large piece of driftwood slanting up the center, and an area at the top they could rest so they were nearer to the surface part of the time. I'm not sure exactly how they got enough food but with the plants I could heavily feed a wide variety of stuff across the tank so there was always food sitting for awhile and I left in larger items for the plecos occasionally. Can't say I'd recommend it but I did find it can be done. Otherwise I kept mine in a species 5g or 10g that they only shared with uncommon colors of ramshorn or applesnail I was breeding.