I have an Aldabra tortoise who is doing great and growing like a weed. I recently purchased several baby eastern box turtles. I tend to do their care one after another as well as feed my group of loggerhead musk turtles. I only have one sink so I cant use separate sinks but each animal has its own water and food dishes as well as soak tubs. I do not prepare their food at the same time nor do I soak them at the same time. I take care of the Easterns, thoroughly wash my hands with antibacterial soap and then proceed to take care of the Aldabra. All dishes are washed using the dishwasher on a heat. I feed the musks last.
Preventing cross contamination.
- Thread starter Andy27012
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Preventing cross contamination between tortoise/turtles can be very challenging. From a disinfection standpoint there is not really any one single chemical that works with many of the known diseases. Some can only be cleaned with Ammonia, some with high strength Hydrogen Peroxide and some with bleach. Some may have no known disinfecting agent.
Antibacterial soap will at most rinse pathogens off but it will not kill anything.
You also have to think about the unknown vectors. It has been suggested that some tortoise pathogens are spread between enclosures by gnats/flies. Stray cats, racoons, possums and so on travel freely between outdoor enclosures. Shoes, the bottoms of your pant legs. The list is endless.
Yes, we generally do. We go through so many gloves in a day that we switched to the vinyl ones used in food prep places because it is easier to pull them onto wet/sweaty hands.
My wife and I deal with separate populations of tortoises on our property. We also have a set order that things are done during the day, if there is an emergency that requires us to break that order we shower and change clothes. I often worry about my phone/watch/glasses being a source of cross contamination as they are not sanitized between enclosures and you inevitably wind up touching them.
We had some Radiateds with Cryptospordium. We euthanized all the positive animals and have kept the negative animals separate. So far the the remaining animals have all been testing negative but we still treat them as positive. With these guys we use disposable food dishes so we don't transmit the disease during dish washing. This type of Crypto hasn't jumped to humans but we didn't want to take any chances with ourselves or the other animals we keep. Used substrate is double bagged an put into the trash instead of the garden. We unfortunately no longer soak them because dealing with the poopy soak water was too risky.
We are dealing with some serious diseases in our tortoise population so we live this all day, every day. Good biosecurity is soooooo important when you are dealing with multiple species of tortoises.
I hate to hear that, I hope you guys are able to continue not testing positive and that it does not spread. My dream is to one day have a group of Kleinmanni. If that ever happens I would be devastated to lose them or any of my animals for reasons other than natural death.
In my opinion, any time you deal with a specialty tortoise that has had some bottlenecks in their US populations you are asking for serious problems with disease. I do not believe it is possible to have a diverse collection of rare tortoises and not have disease problems. I can't imagine the level of mortality that is swept under the rug with some of these crazy youtube guys that have tons of tortoises all over their properties.
The people that I believe sold me the sick radiated tortoises admitted to having Cryptospordium in their kleinmanni collection but not their radiateds. I have heard of a couple of other people that have crypto in their kleinmanni as well. I don't know much about them but I think they have a pretty limited gene pool here in the US so I would throw out a guess that there are many infected collections.
One of the other diseases that we have had the misfortune of dealing with is TINC. TINC was first described in a radiated collection in Georgia in the 90s although it was likely in that collection as far back as the 70s. I took a look at the Radiated studbook a few months ago to "contact trace" TINC from that source in Georgia and was stunned at the possible spread. ~25% of the collections in the studbook had animals from the original infected collection. Another 67% of the collections in the studbook had received animals from the previous potentially infected group of 25%. So ~92% of the keepers in the studbook are 1 keeper or less removed from the source of one of the nastiest tortoise diseases there is. There are people that breed radiateds today that know they are infected with TINC and they continue to sell animals.
TINC has become a big problem now in Redfoots, Leopards and a MAJOR problem in Galapagos tortoises.
I didn't mean to go off on this rant. I suppose my point is, biosecurity is only going to go so far. You need to start with clean animals but even some of the most highly respected breeders in the country are dirtbags selling sick animals. At some point the burden for proving an animal is healthy needs to shift to the breeders. I would never buy another tortoise from someone that couldn't show me years worth of PCR based testing data for a slew of tortoise diseases for every breeder animal in their collection. No one can do that today, not even zoos.
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On the original topic, some thoughts:
Do not keep large numbers of animals together where they can contact each other - especially if you have species that are rare or have conservation value. It is smarter to keep multiple small groups or even house them individually. Treat each group as if they could be sick and maintain permanent bio-security between them. For some species I keep 2-4 tortoises in a group even if it means I have many quarantined groups of the same species. Even babies that I have hatched and raised together, will get split into smaller quarantined groups as they grow to maturity.
Do not use the same stuff (water dishes, food dishes, etc) between different enclosures and don't let them come in contact with each other. Do not wash all the dishes together. I think if you can autoclave sterilize them or bake in the oven it may be OK but I don't have an autoclave and baking would be too time consuming. I rarely take the dishes out of their enclosure unless they are so nasty that I have no other choice. With gloved hands, I will normally dump any old water into the substrate, wipe the dishes clean with paper towels that I got ready ahead of time, and then use the paper towels to grab and wrap up any waste solids or uneaten food from where i dumped the dish. I then invert the glove over the soiled paper towels and dispose in the trash. If the dishes get too dirty I throw them away and use new ones.
Use disposable gloves and change them between different animal enclosures. If you must use bare hands, washing aggressively with strong antibacterial soap is better than using hand sanitizer. It is, however, completely impractical for anyone with a lot of tortoises. My hands would end up dry, cracked, and bleeding with that much hand washing.
Testing (such as via PCR) might reduce the risk some but it is not fool-proof. I have reason to believe that TINC is being missed during PCR tests - not an issue with the tests themselves, but with tortoises not shedding the disease at the time/place the sample was taken. With many of these diseases we have no studies or documentation to know if we can reliably detect "carrier" animals via PCR. So unfortunately, I am not convinced that testing is the answer to any of this.
You minimize the risk the best you can but there is no 100% solution. Buying hatchlings directly from breeders is probably the least risk but is still not low risk. Bio-security is very important in the even you do potentially bring something in. Babies are small, keep them indoors so you have the best odds of maintaining quarantine. Most of the time (not always!) health issues will become obvious within 6-12 months and before you put other animals at risk.
Network with people, become educated on the species you have interest in, what diseases have been detected in them before, etc. Get to know who the breeders are, what their reputation is, where their previous hatchlings are going, whether or not they are still alive, etc.
Steve
Do not keep large numbers of animals together where they can contact each other - especially if you have species that are rare or have conservation value. It is smarter to keep multiple small groups or even house them individually. Treat each group as if they could be sick and maintain permanent bio-security between them. For some species I keep 2-4 tortoises in a group even if it means I have many quarantined groups of the same species. Even babies that I have hatched and raised together, will get split into smaller quarantined groups as they grow to maturity.
Do not use the same stuff (water dishes, food dishes, etc) between different enclosures and don't let them come in contact with each other. Do not wash all the dishes together. I think if you can autoclave sterilize them or bake in the oven it may be OK but I don't have an autoclave and baking would be too time consuming. I rarely take the dishes out of their enclosure unless they are so nasty that I have no other choice. With gloved hands, I will normally dump any old water into the substrate, wipe the dishes clean with paper towels that I got ready ahead of time, and then use the paper towels to grab and wrap up any waste solids or uneaten food from where i dumped the dish. I then invert the glove over the soiled paper towels and dispose in the trash. If the dishes get too dirty I throw them away and use new ones.
Use disposable gloves and change them between different animal enclosures. If you must use bare hands, washing aggressively with strong antibacterial soap is better than using hand sanitizer. It is, however, completely impractical for anyone with a lot of tortoises. My hands would end up dry, cracked, and bleeding with that much hand washing.
Testing (such as via PCR) might reduce the risk some but it is not fool-proof. I have reason to believe that TINC is being missed during PCR tests - not an issue with the tests themselves, but with tortoises not shedding the disease at the time/place the sample was taken. With many of these diseases we have no studies or documentation to know if we can reliably detect "carrier" animals via PCR. So unfortunately, I am not convinced that testing is the answer to any of this.
You minimize the risk the best you can but there is no 100% solution. Buying hatchlings directly from breeders is probably the least risk but is still not low risk. Bio-security is very important in the even you do potentially bring something in. Babies are small, keep them indoors so you have the best odds of maintaining quarantine. Most of the time (not always!) health issues will become obvious within 6-12 months and before you put other animals at risk.
Network with people, become educated on the species you have interest in, what diseases have been detected in them before, etc. Get to know who the breeders are, what their reputation is, where their previous hatchlings are going, whether or not they are still alive, etc.
Steve
False negatives are a significant issue with TINC and Crypto. It is very possible to miss them both via PCR. That is why years worth of serial testing data would be a necessity. You may miss it sometimes, you may miss it most of the time but I can't imagine you will miss it every time if every animal in your collection is tested quarterly. I pay for this and I don't sell animals. If you are selling hatchlings for thousands of dollars a piece, its not too much to ask to have a serial testing program.
Without testing all you have is the sellers word and the accuracy of the rumor mill for who does and doesn't have sick tortoises.
You can add the shady breeder challenge in here. We have Radiateds from three "breeders." We have later come to find that two of the three didn't actually breed the animals themselves. They are either getting hatchlings back from someone else who is holding their animals, or they are bringing them in from out of state using a CBW permit then selling. This may be illegal, I suspect these people will eventually have all their animals seized and face criminal penalties. Just because a breeder implies they bred an animal, doesn't mean they did.
This is good advice and something I should have done a better job with.
Lots of great info in this thread. I’ve recently had to try to persuade someone to separate their (probably) wild caught hermann’s from their two year old sulcata. With my warning, they decided they’d just wait a while longer until the sulcata, which was already larger than the hermann’s, was bigger. “They’ve done fine for the last two years,” they claimed. This implies, of course, that they were housing a hatchling sulcata with a fully grown testudo.
I’m sure any fight between a larger sulcata and a smaller hermann’s has the potential to be fatal, on top of disease transfer risks with a wild caught animal from a different continent. It’s amazing to me that so many people don’t grasp the urgency of it. This is stuff that destroys entire collections. That isn’t even close to the first time I’ve had to warn people recently, either. The popular YouTubers mixing species certainly are not helping anything.
Sorry to hijack your post a bit, Andy. I’m happy you’re so responsible with your different species when so many aren’t. I hope things continue to go well for you.
I’m sure any fight between a larger sulcata and a smaller hermann’s has the potential to be fatal, on top of disease transfer risks with a wild caught animal from a different continent. It’s amazing to me that so many people don’t grasp the urgency of it. This is stuff that destroys entire collections. That isn’t even close to the first time I’ve had to warn people recently, either. The popular YouTubers mixing species certainly are not helping anything.
Sorry to hijack your post a bit, Andy. I’m happy you’re so responsible with your different species when so many aren’t. I hope things continue to go well for you.
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