My reptile apparently ate a ribbon (satiny, white) and it came out (that's how I found out he ate it). I keep him in his cage while I am at work and he gets time outside of it when I get home until he falls alseep. He also is in an area that is carefully inclosed from the rest of the house and I ALWAYS make sure anything small he could choke on or might eat is off the floor.

My question is; how long could it have stayed in there (my vet didn't say) and WHY would he be interested in eating something that had no taste?

At the vets I ran into a nice man with his snake that had ingested a large thermometer (that was in the snakes cage) and they were going to do surgery when he vomited it out finally!

I guess reptiles just swallow things they think are food. Anyone else have stories like these?

This is why we caution people about allowing their animals to roam unsupervised. They can get themselves into trouble with things that you normally wouldn't think would be a problem. At least it passed! It could have become entangled in the intestine and required surgery as well!

You ought to be around a bunch of iguana owners when they talk about things iguanas have eaten. They range from subway tokens, rubber bands, to latex exam gloves. I even know of one female owner whose ig ate her panties! Different things trigger feeding behavior. Igs eat by color. Mine was sizing up a friend's red polish on her toenails for a taste when I warned her off.

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Merlin,
What's Life Without A Little Magic!

Oh free roaming, even only when you are home, brings a whole host of potential problems. That said my iguana is usually out once or more a day.

Most anything small and brightly colored is apt to be tried as food. For some reason coins and nails are also common for igs to injest.

I mainly have problems when my ig tries to climb on things. At one point he knocked something off my desk and as it fell it broke a window. This was the last time I left his cage open when I was not at home.

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~ Mark

Yummy! Strawberries =)

A lot of things get eaten by curiosity or testing to see if its food. My Bearded Dragon ate a pebble and when I thought "ok, he saw that it didn't had any taste and will leave the rest alone", he ate another.

To answer your question, let me tell you that those river pebbles came out a few days, almost a week later and they looked like pumice.

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Oh the crazy things they will eat...
Taz (iguana) ate a fun-sized bag of cheetos while we were out of the house one day, he also too mouthfuls of kitty litter and cat food.
Tequila (Blue Tongue Skink) managed to lick up shoe string and couldnt get it out of her mouth so she just kept chewing on it until I saw her and carefully pulled it out.
Zola (Bearded Dragon) ate a rubberband and I had to pry his mouth open to get it out and I lost a finger tip in he process. I think this was another case of a taste test gone wrong.


I think alot of the time when they eat things that they shouldn't its a case of them tongue flicking it and not being able to spit it out...I have definitely become a cleaner person since getting herps who freeroam.

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~*~Lacey~*~

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A few years ago my iguana started to eat a bright orange hockey skate lase. He got about 24" of it down when he got to the skate and nothing more would fit in his mouth.

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~ Mark

The guy who used to own Buster, the larger of my two water monitors, occassionally fed him cheeseburgers.

I'd never associated reptiles with cheeseburgers before. Kinda funny.

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I saw one of my sailfin lizards chewing the plastic of their water bowls.It looked strange because they still had some food in their food bowls.I think reptiles do get a bit too curious sometimes.

My turtles will attempt to eat anything that remotely looks like food, and have even been known to dine on their own droppings from time to time (yummy!). I've had salamanders that would mistake a moving flower for a tasty insect, but salamanders are not among the world's brightest of creatures. Aside from that, mine haven't really eaten much that's not edible. Rhizor has tried to eat pinkies, which are way too large for him, but at least it's food of some sort. My herps don't get much, if any, time outside their habitats though. They're too small.

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Hi my blue tonge she had ate a price tag!! And she poop it out but it was like man I thoght that she was going to get so sick from that.