Turtle Food Facts

Video Transcript

"Hello, my name's James Dix, owner and founder of Reptile Rescue Service in Salt Lake City, Utah. We're going to go over some turtle food habits and diets that they have to have depending upon the species. We'll give you a little information real quick on what most of them do prefer. If it's a land tortoise, depending upon if it's a box turtle, they like to eat wild crickets, earthworms, they will eat wild grasses, wild berries. If it's a tortoise, which is a desert species, they eat the cactus, the prickly pear fruit, they'll actually eat the beaver tail cactus itself, wild grasses. And sometimes they will eat insects. Depending upon, once again, on the species, you have to know what species you have and then you can get the exact information on what they do need to eat. The most important thing is to make sure that these guys do have the UVV lights for simulated sunlight if you keep 'em in the house, because they cannot get any UV rays in the home. So you have to give 'em imitation to make their actual shells stay hard, or they can have a metabolic bone disease problem, or the shell gets soft and mushy, like a grape."