Rocks, Minerals & Micronutrients
Posted: 22 Jul 2017, 18:02
A bit of a lead in to my question. A few weeks ago, in an effort to stop my year old Hermann (Elliott!) from dragging dirt clods into his lime powder, I tried sinking the lime dish in a little garden of gravel. He was thrilled with this and immediately started eating gravel bits, and managed to swallow three or four before I noticed and took them away (he's fine, no damage done). I looked up this behaviour and found lots of information on turtles and tortoises eating rocks and soil looking for trace minerals and micronutrients, and plenty more on the risks of impaction if a little guy eats too many stones. Seems like a bad idea. But not too much later while looking for limestone powder I found a product that is just powderized rock. Here's a link to what I bought.
http://www.gaiagreen.com/images/downloa ... 202015.pdf
Thinking that if limestone was okay to snack on, this shouldn't be too different, I picked it up and gave him some. He is crazy about it. It's pretty clear that there are some minerals in there he was starving for. The thing is, I can't find any information on tortoise keepers feeding anything like this to their tortoises, for or against. There is plenty of evidence that this is probably a natural behaviour:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/te ... that-mine/
but I can also see in the product breakdown trace amounts of things like lead and arsenic. In those cases it looks like 10-20 parts per million, probably not different from any of the elements in a back yard, but the aluminum ratio is much higher. And I am the opposite of an expert in any of this. Is anyone aware of any research on this?
http://www.gaiagreen.com/images/downloa ... 202015.pdf
Thinking that if limestone was okay to snack on, this shouldn't be too different, I picked it up and gave him some. He is crazy about it. It's pretty clear that there are some minerals in there he was starving for. The thing is, I can't find any information on tortoise keepers feeding anything like this to their tortoises, for or against. There is plenty of evidence that this is probably a natural behaviour:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/te ... that-mine/
but I can also see in the product breakdown trace amounts of things like lead and arsenic. In those cases it looks like 10-20 parts per million, probably not different from any of the elements in a back yard, but the aluminum ratio is much higher. And I am the opposite of an expert in any of this. Is anyone aware of any research on this?