Self Replication: Can a turtle program another turtle?

I'm attempting to add self replication behavior to turtles, but I think that this would require that when one turtle crafts a new turtle it would need some way to give the new turtle some initial behavior. Otherwise I would just have a bunch of empty husks laying around. As far as I know turtles can't run commands on a new turtle unless that turtle has already been setup to listen for wireless messages or something.

The other possibility I can imagine is to have some kind of "startup script" that all turtles run when they are created. This could set them up with their initial behavior and possibly to listen for further instructions. I don't know if that's possible either though.

Any advice? This minecraft world isn't going to colonize itself…

If a turtle is adjacent to a disk drive with a disk containing a file named "startup", it will execute the code in that startup file when it is turned on. Turtles and computers have a peripheral interface that allows another computer to turn them on and off.