Is this the beginning of pyramiding?

[TammyJ]

Letting the tortoise eat the shell of a hard-boiled egg is not harmful and is a very good source of natural calcium.

Absolutely. Hard boiled egg, cut in half in the shell. Great Redfoot tortoise food! Mine loved it.

 

[Alex and the Redfoot]

Letting the tortoise eat the shell of a hard-boiled egg is not harmful and is a very good source of natural calcium.

It's like with opuntia pads - I know it's safe to feed as-is but I still remove the spines And I was under the impression that egg shells, just like chalk or cuttlefish bone have less absorbable calcium than calcium supplements.

Thank you for the correction!

 

[wellington]

Yes, you certainly can do that as well. Crickets and grasshoppers might be devoured, but not sure about pill bugs (although the pill bugs are good to have in the substrate anyway, so if they aren't eaten, nothing is really lost).

A note about crickets: they are very good at escaping and you may end up with a number of them roaming around in your house. Just be aware of that.

I used to raise crickets to feed to my chameleons and had crickets all over the place because they often escaped from the chameleons before being eaten. In the end, I gave one of my big male Veiled Chameleons free range of my tortoise room so he could find and eat the escaped crickets. You never knew where you might find him in the room. I didn't mind it, but it was very disconcerting for my wife who did not like chameleons ("They're always looking at me", she would say).

Anyway, good luck.

Oh I had that cricket house invasion. Two floors. Also crickets for my chameleon. They are just to slow for too many of those buggers. I then switched to the Dubai roaches. They were not kept in my house though.