Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hi there-
I just recently purchased a young black and white argentine tegu. Today, actually
I have read a lot of sites say you can feed them eggs, with shell and all. Now, he/she is just a little guy right now so obviously a chicken egg is out of the question, heh. My question is, what about small crested gecko eggs? I have a small breeding group of crested geckos and I don't usually incubate every single egg that gets laid. Could I feed these eggs to the tegu?

I apologize if its been answered before.. but the search function here isn't all that helpful when i tried looking it up.

Thanks!

Used to feed my blackthroat monitor Zebra Finch and Canary eggs from the petsmart I worked at. They wouldnt allow the females to incubate the eggs, so I got free food from it. Also would feed him anole eggs and the occasional anole...I can't imagine it would hurt them at all, as long as your breeding stock is healthy (which, if they're producing eggs, I'm assuming they are.)

I would look into it further and see if there is a common parasite that can be shared between the two reptiles. Many times parasites or diseases can be passed from feeder reptiles to their new hosts. Since eggs pass through the cloaca, it could be a possibility.

There is no problem with a baby tegu eating a chicken egg. Crack it, boil it, scramble it....I don't know of many people who just hand their tegus a whole raw oval egg.

Lol, I guess I was hanging out on youtube too much, I seem to remember viewing a few videos where an adult tegu was offered an entire chicken egg, whole and raw and in my mind I just assumed that was what was done. But anyhow, I did hard boil some for my tegu and chopped it up and she eats them with much gusto.

As far as the gecko eggs, I got to feed her a couple today that were laid last night, and she loved those too. Thanks for the replies!

I think my question in regards to the whole egg scenario is...why not? Is there someone in the wild scrambling eggs for tegus? Absolutely not. And not to mention whatever nutritional value is found in the shell itself. I'm guessing at least a little bit of added calcium. Like I said in my earlier post, my lizard was quite happy with the whole finch and dove eggs...and believe me, I was not cooking tiny little eggs in a tiny little pan!

Agreed, which is why I never questioned the videos of the tegus eating the whole eggs. It's natural to them. I guess domesticated unfertilized chicken eggs aren't on the actual wild menu but eggs are eggs, no?

And for the record, those gecko eggs I gave her were also not cooked in a little tiny frying pan But I couldn't help but picture that finch egg scenario and get a good laugh out of it, lol!

Yea, I suppose it would be best if you could get ahold of organic/free range eggs...we just also happen to have free range chickens on "the farm" so that's actually an option for us now too.