Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Recently i noticed that in one of my ficus plant's pot there are some white mushroom/fungus things growing. I was wondering if i have any reason to have these removed, or are they okay to just leave it there. It does look quite pretty...lol.

If your Panthers are like mine, they eat other things besides the food items you give them. I've seen my Panthers eat bark and leaves just like Veileds. So when the mushrooms popped up in their plants I pulled them. They just grow back. I covered them with moss, now my Chams eat the moss too.

i would remove them for the same reason chaco said. your panthers may munch on the mushrooms, and if they end up being toxic youd have a problem on your hands.

It is in my merumontanus cage actually. But hey, better safe than sorry huh? Guess i'll have to forget about creatign that rain forest look and remove that shrooms.

I wouldn't worry about it for the chameleons sake. If you were keeping veileds this might be a problem (more from husbandry problems of being too moist than from the ingestion possibility.) You may want to investigate them more closely to see if they are growing in the soil or on the tree itself. If they are growing on the tree this may indicate that your ficus tree is in trouble as fungal infections are often indicitive that the tree is on it's way out. In this case you may want to see if you have proper drainage in your cage as overwatering may be causing root rot on your trees. BTW although they are obviously not chameleons American box turtles routinely eat animita mushrooms which would easily kill you or me and in fact are so potentialy toxic themselves from eating these mushrooms that it is dangerous to eat them (not that I would anyway, but this is what NYS claims is the basis of their law classifying box turtles as a game species with a "permanent closed season"