how easily can they access the surface ? we had an unusually mild winter, possibly if the water is not cold enough they may have needed to breathe some air , they may have been too lethargic to swim to the surface..... when they're cold sometimes even a hard climb to the surface is too much ...
on full sun days in february here , it'd be 15F outside , and i'd be opening the doors to keep it from getting to HOT inside..... when the sun goes down the temps plummet, you need to use objects of some type to somewhat stabilize the temperature at night.... i use the ground, rocks/boulders...
by a raised bed i meant added soil in a frame ,on top of the natural ground....... the substrate temperatures in an enclosure off the ground are way too erratic .... as long as the ground is near 60 at the surface , it'd be fine , they'd use the sun to heat up beyond that..... dig down a...
your box turtle is in rough shape , natural daylight and getting her to eat some kind of quality commercial pellets, keeping her in a wetter environment might help....... i feed my box turtles soaked hikari cichlid gold , worms , beef liver, bugs, fruit, sweet potatoes, bil jac frozen dog...
my thought would be to put a mercury vapor light on a timer in their pen...... i use them outside in the fall and spring...... the ground temperature is a big deal, they get a lot of their heat from the ground.... a raised bed may help, just don't let them hibernate in a raised bed .....
i wouldn't worry about eating veggies, feed live bugs, worms, soaked/softened fish or turtle pellets, strawberries, blueberries, apples, pears............ how wet is the enclosure? baby box turtles need kept in a really wet environment, too dry can kill them.......outside is optimum, i suppose...
my job is in cleveland on the lake, we are closing that day due to the expected traffic........ our local weather says the cloud cover should clear out by noon.....
i read one time, the odds of any of this randomly happening is about the same as an oxford english dictionary resulting from a print shop explosion......
blueberries , strawberries , mushrooms ......i've seen quite a few box turtles when morel's are in season , i believe they'll eat just about any kind of mushrooms, even poisonous ones..... apple trees, mulberry trees and pear trees .....
i agree...... i've always used sphagnum moss , never had a problem...... my outside pens are all full of moss , i've never seen one eat it ..... sphagnum moss is edible, i believe it has 0 nutritional value, just not something they eat....
this el nino stuff is for real , warmest winter of my lifetime, never seen nothing like it , 70's end of february , first week of march, northeast ohio...... least snow too, by about 4 feet ...... the soil temp is currently 62F , the 10yr average is 36.6F
i hibernate eastern box turtles outside , if i see one out when they shouldn't be , i keep them awake by bringing them in with spring/summer like conditions for the winter ....... it's not always that they were ill, but more than once i've seen some that were ill and required medical care over...
sorry to hear about your tortoise...... how many have you lost brumating them outside? when the tortoise initially did not dig in , you shouldn't have hibernated it.......... ill tortoises are said to bask more often during brumation than non-ill tortoises..... the reason , theorized, is to...
do you know what dosage your vet said it would take?
MERK veterinary manual says the dose for an alligator with mycoplasmosis is 10mg/kg every 4-5 days ......
i have a pdf where they describe using it on sea turtles at 20-40mg/kg after an initial dose of 40-80mg/kg every 3 days.... , my...
too bad as baytril is the most proven method of dealing with this problem.......... terramycin (oxytetracycline) comes as an injectable..... did your vet tell you oxytetracycline was not available in your country ? it's pretty commonly used in sheep, pigs, cattle, and is used in reptiles on...