My seven-year-old asked me today, and I didn’t know, so of course I now turn to the collective wisdom of the SDMB…
Some may, but I’ve found plenty of “shed” snake skins in my wanderings.
Not that I’ve ever heard of but frogs and some lizards do. .
Reptiles are wacky that way. I’ve seen a nature show or two where a lizard eats its own shedded skin. “It’s too nutritious to leave behind,” the narrator said. Can’t say if it applies to snakes, but it might.
I have worked in a venom lab where I took care of thousands of snakes, and I’ve bred snakes commercially. I’ve never seen a snake eat its skin. Some species of lizards do it routinely.
Former curator of living collections for a herpetelogical facility: Never seen it once. As others have said, it is common enough in lizards and frogs though.
sidebar: Crotalus, I expect your specialty is North American pit vipers then? 
I probably extracted venom from more Naja kaouthia than any other species, because the lab I worked at had a standing contract for cobra venom from a couple of pharmaceutical companies. But, as my user name suggests, the rattlesnakes are my favorite animals.
Hey, Crotalus, you’d love it at our place. We’ve go an Eastern Diamondback, a Western Diamondback, a couple of Mojaves, a pair of Timbers, a Northern Pacific. a Missisaugua and a Cascabella (sp?) the South American one. Yes we’ve got the permits to match. We’ve also got Horned Vipers and a couple of Mangrove snakes as well as a Madagascgar Hognose and a Western Hognose. Oh, and whallops of Kings, Corns, Boas, Pythons, Milks and a Gopher snake.
None of whom eat their sheds.
Inspecting the shed skin from a snake for completness is one of the ways snake keepers will make sure there isn’t a left over bit stuck to the snake, waiting to strangulate him.
That’s right. You especially want to check th little caps over the eyes. If left on, they can cause a lot of trouble.
Sounds like a pretty good representation of rattlesnakes in your collection. I hope to see some Mojaves in the wild for the first time next week. I’ll be vacationing in their range. If I ever vacation in your area, I like to stop in to visit your snakes.
Your spelling for Crotalus durissus is fine; it varies among cascabel, cascabela, cascavel, so why not cascabella? But that Sistrurus species you have should be massasauga.
You know, that IS the way it’s spelled on the cage. I’m just used to seeing “Missasauga” the place name and I assumed, wrongly, that the boss screwed it up. Oops!
So, does anyone know why snakes don’t eat their sheddings? It does seem like a fair amount of protein available for free. Why pass it up? Is it just not in an easily digestible form? Some snakes do, after all, eat other snakes.
I’ve never seen or heard of any snake eating sheds either.
As for ‘why’, well, questions of teleology versus the non-directed nature of evolution aside and as speculation only, snakes have a rather specialized swallowing system (physiology and behaviors) that deals adequately with discrete, rather dense food objects. I suspect a snake would have serious physical problems ingesting a paper-thin, almost weightless shed.
I can’t believe I am replying to a message that is 15 years old, but things got pretty weird here. I have kept reptiles for over 50 years now, keeping, breeding thousands of snakes over that time. In all that time, I have never seen a snake devour a skin… Until last night.
I have three Dumerils boas in a fairly large two level enclosure. Yesterday I acquired another. This guy is about the same size as my other 3 year old guys, eating large / jumbo rats, maybe 4.5 to 5 foot snakes. The new one, however is supposed to be 5 years or better. I think he might have been underfed.
Anyway, I brought him home last night, fed him a medium/large rat in a box, and added him to my group this morning. I removed another snake that had just shed, and I got a rat for that one to feed in the box. I did that and looked into the enclosure, and there was the new one, alone in the lower level, mouth open, swallowing a big clump of the shed of the other snake. He swallowed it like it was a rat. I did not witness him start, nor see how or possibly why he approached it, but he finished it up like a meal. I actually took video, though if you really cared to see it, you would need to walk me through the process of uploading it.
Feel free to disbelieve me. I would have, though you never really know what an animal is going to do.
Welcome to the Dope Plizardman. Doubters need reminding that exceptions should be expected in nature. Vegetarian animals sometimes eat meat, carnivores will eat plants. Even if there’s some reason snakes don’t eat their shed skin most of the time there’s nothing unbelievably extraordinary about someone who has observed enough snake behavior eventually seeing a snake eat it’s own skin contrary to typical behavior.
Yes, welcome, @Plizardman . The post you’re replying to is indeed old, but the policy here is that we always allow bumps of old threads to add substantive new information, which your post certainly is. And I’d certainly want to see the video you took, if you can figure out how to share it, not because I doubt you, but because it sounds like it’d be interesting.
I don’t think that worked. I’ll ask my daughter to figure this out tomorrow.
-Phil
Most likely, you (or she) will need to upload the video to YouTube and paste the URL here.
You get fifty internet points for realizing it in the first place. Most folks who bump ancient threads around here never bother to look at the date.
Thanks for the interesting update and welcome to the Dope!