Cris: Crikey! The whole point of this experiment is to test what they need, not research what is in their natural diet and replicate it. The easiest way to give them everything which is in a whole animal is to give them a whole animal! The only benefit of the artificial diets are that they don't freak out squeamish people. I am not in the slightest bit squeamish. I could give them the occasional whole animal or supplement, but that would defeat the point of the experiment. I don't think 30 years is required. If you can grow a tiny baby up into a healthy adult and get it to produce healthy babies, that's enough for me to think we have some very useful results. Yes, it's possible that the snakes may die in 20 years rather than 50, or 50 rather than 100 (we don't yet know how long they live for), or maybe they'll live to 100 years rather than 80. We won't know everything, but we'll have some useful information and if things are going well I'll continue.
You didn't evolve eating an exclusive diet of whole animals, so it's not surprising that you can do without them. You should try eaten some though, it's lots of fun.
The 'supermarket meat chemicals' are probably not worth worrying about, but it's easy enough to use wild meat (one deer will provide about a zillion Death Adder meals, and hey, it'll sound cool if I can say my Death Adders eat venison), so that's probably what I'll use.
Yes, I have controls, although I'm not claiming that this is going to be a finely tuned experiment which will be publishable in Nature. It's just a little backyard experiment. If there is a 10% difference in growth rate, I'm not going to notice it because I'm not going to be caring. If you get two littermates and grow them up under identical conditions you'll usually get more than a 10% difference in growth anyway. I'm just wanting to know if they're going to be basically healthy on muscle, bone, fat and skin.
DDALDD: As far as I know there's nothing more to it than 'it happens in the wild so it is necessary in captivity', which is a severely flawed way of thinking and all too common among reptile keepers. I don't think there's much nutritional difference between a whole bird, a whole mammal and a whole reptile, but there is a fair bit of difference between a whole animal and a piece of muscle and a bone.
Thanks to those who are interested in helping me with the basics of experiment design
I'm an honours graduate, one of my majors was zoology and I've studied chemistry and nutrition among several other things, so I pretty much that side of things covered
I do appreciate some of the other points though, even if only because without taking some things into account, many reptile keepers will dismiss the results no matter how valid they are.
Cheers