What Does a Garter Snake Eat?

Video Transcript

"My name is Tim Cole, I am the owner of Austin Reptile Service. What people are probably referring to are garter snakes, which is a striped species of snake that occurs throughout the United States. And most of them will feed on fish or frogs, but several subspecies will also feed on mice. But whenever somebody sets up a backyard pond, with minnows and small goldfish, they are probably going to attract garter snakes, because that is what they like to feed on. One of the tricks to keep your fish in the pond is just to buy larger fish to start off, so they are not feeding on the baby goldfish. And that will usually take care of that problem. But all of our garter snakes do have a stripe going down the back, some of them can be red, some can be orange, some can be yellow. So they do vary. And we even have one garter snake here in the Austin area that has a checkerboard pattern on its back. So they call that the checkered garter snake. So mainly these guys are going to, like I said, feed on fish and frogs, maybe even earthworms. And that is how you feed a garter snake."