Creating the Right Environment for a King Snake

Video Transcript

"On behalf of Expert Village I'm Nicole and I'm here to tell you about king snakes. Providing an environment for your king snake is fairly simple since they are native to this area and all over the United States. It's going to basically be a snake that you want to keep relatively dried, some require a little bit humidity, most don't and most don't have to supply too much supplemental heating for these guys. Maybe just a basking light in the afternoon for a few hours so that they would enjoy what a lot of the times as long as you keep your house at moderate temperatures you king snake will be fine without supplemental lighting. They do need vitamin D which is produced by the sun rays so if they do not have exposure to the natural sunlight you may want to purchase a UVB bulb which will mimic the suns light. It will allow the snake to produce vitamin D, king snakes vary in size some king snakes like smaller species only tend to get about 2 1/2 maybe 3 feet long. The larger species can get up to 7 or 8 sometimes even 9 feet. I think the longest king snake on record was about 9 1/2 feet long. King snakes this size will eat pinky's which are newborn baby mice and they will graduate up to hoppers which is mice with fur and their eyes open. Up to adult mice now some king snakes can eat rats it depends on the size of your snake. A lot of times it will be preferably to keep your snakes on the smallest diet possible for it's size. Simply because of the danger of gotten bitten by the prey unless you feed frozen food which is often preferred by captive breeders or hobbiest because they don't have to go through feeding live prey to their snakes. And it's often it's a good way to keep a snake from striking to give it frozen food because if you don't give a reason to strike it usually won't strike at all."