# Turtle ate a stone! Help please.



## conradd (Jun 21, 2010)

Recently I caught my red bellied turtle eating a stone from his tank. He digs around a lot but this is the first time I actually caught him eating a stone. It was a small pebble about 3cm in length and width. He is currently about 5 1/2 inches to 6 inches and pretty hardy. I removed all the stones from his tank so I don't have to worry about him eating them, but who knows how long he has been eating them for. Why might he be eating them in the first place? I feed him freeze dried krill and turtle sticks. Enough to warrant a water change once a week+poo. But more importently, because he won't be able to eat any more pebbles , will he be ok? Please help me out on what I should do!

PS: I have seen no signs of abnormal behavior thus far.


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## Corwin (May 23, 2010)

if it doesnt affect him, he may just pass them when he eats them.

Also (this is just a guess) you may want to look into reasearching the type of turtle you have, I know some animals need to ingest stones in order to help with the digestion of their food.


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## Albino_101 (Aug 14, 2008)

yeah, alligators and crocodiles are notorious for this, since they cant chew, and must swallow their food after ripping it off the bone, they ingest stones to help break up food in their stomach, and the stones pass once they smooth out, and the process starts over.


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## conradd (Jun 21, 2010)

Well I removed all of the stones in his tank and sure enough when he pooped stones came with. So I also removed those ones.


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## Corwin (May 23, 2010)

did you check to see if he needed them before you did that?


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