Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I need 5 varieties of veggies to feed my boxies.
I mostly feed them fruit. I add vitiamans's for what they are missing.

Carrots, squash, romaine lettuce.

Why do you need 5?
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0.1.0 snapping turtle
0.1.0 painted turtle
0.1.0 ornate box turtle
1.0.0 eastern box turtle
0.1.0 Australian shepard
0.0.12 chickens
3.2.0 children
1.0.0 husband

just for variety.

Here's what mine like ALOT: winter squashes (butternut and acorn in particular), summer squashes(yellow and zucchine), carrots, sweet potatoes/yams, cucumbers, tomatoes (more as a treat). I may but a pumpkin or two and freeze the flesh and see if they like that.
They also REALLY like certain wild mushrooms that I gather when the opportunity arises. They don't like store-bought button mushrooms at all.
The winter squashes are better than the summer squashes when it comes to nutritional value.
What do you give them in the way of greens?
Stephanie

I'd be nervous about wild mushrooms. How do you know they're not toxic?

What's poisonous to humans isn't necessarily poisonous to turtles. I have found that there are certain ones that they prefer to eat, namely sponge mushrooms, or boletes ( the underside of the cap looks lke a sponge instead of having 'fins'). I'll bring home an assortment, and they sniff at them and eat the ones that they want. They tend eat the more colorful ones.
I brought home an enormous bolete once, the cap was about 10 inches in diameter, and they gobbled it up: one turtle in particular ate nearly half of it. He literally stuffed himself to a point where he couldn't swallow any more and couldn't close his shell.
Stephanie

Steph you're finding native mushrooms & the turtles are native too? Do you pick only certain ones?
I need a mushroom field guide because I don't know one from another but they scare me because we had a huge bloom in the lawn last fall. I picked over 100 of them but my sulcata found one before I did, she ate it then began to vomit a little while later. She's not native though & the mushroom was, although I still don't know what kind of mushrooms they were.
I lugged her to the vet but actually vomiting was the best thing she could've done because she got the poison out. She scared me nearly to death though!
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PHRatz

Yes, our box turtles are native (Easterns) and in fact were rescued from a construction site (now a shopping ceter) just 5 miles from our house, so they're local as well. During the process of rescuing the turtles, we made mental notes of what sorts of foods were in their original habitat: there were plenty of mushrooms in some places, so I picked some and offered them to the turtles. I've even given them to hatchlings, with no problem. They seem to be very well equipped to identify what's edible and what's not. They won't eat button mushrooms from the grocery store.

I've picked a variety for them, but they don't eat all kinds. I bought a field guide, and found that the ones they prefer (boletes) are, as a group, the least likely to be toxic.
That presumes toxicity to humans, not other creatures.

In your situation, I would guess that desert tortoises would be much less likely to encounter mushrooms in the wild, given that their native habitat is arid.

Stephanie

My turtles also totally ignore store bought mushrooms. They ONLY eat the wild ones that pop up occassionally in their enclosures. I have no idea what type of mushrooms they are or if they are poisonous, I just see the stem sticking out of the ground with the rest of the mushroom gone.

Take a look at this website, it'll help you out a lot. Now that you know about veggies for them, definately cut way back on the fruits.

http://boxturtlesite.org/diet.html