My sulcata always has some sound recently. Any problem?

[qiangzhu]

The sulcata is about 9 inches. The sound is like “gua” or "puf". 2-3 days per day. Is there any problem? I searched online and some articles said it is because there is some disease in his respiratory tract or lungs. Not sure it is correct or not. I don't see any running nose on his face.

The sulcata is raised in a semi-closed chamber (it is modified by a homedepot christmas tree box so it cannot be sealed very well and there are some places to let the uvb lamp,heating lamp and ceramic lamp to go in) with 90F temperatures (100F in the basking point) and 60-90% humidity (since it is a semi-closed chamber, the moisture substrate method to keep humidity will not work so the humidity is boosted by a continously running humidifier which makes his enclosure pretty foggy).

Thanks

 

[ariesxiao]

If the tortoise has runny nose or it is hard to breath by nose (it may open his month to breath very often) or it has some saliva remains around its month, there may be a problem with its respiratory system. Otherwise I am not worried about it too much. But continue to do a close observation

 

[Yvonne G]

At 9" it's long past time for this animal to be living outside with access to a warm house/shelter. Real sunshine and clean air will do wonders for this tortoise.

 

[ariesxiao]

I found something for you recently. Don’t use a fog humidifier to add humidity. The problem is the fog humidifier will mist not only the water but everything in the water including bacterial, virus and minerals. Those things will cause lung problems if it is breathed by your tortoise. If you have a large tortoise house, you can consider to use an evaporative humidifier to add humidity. Evaporative humidifier has a filter which will filter most of the minerals and bacterias. It doesn’t mist the water but use a fan to blow the humidity air to the room. Bacterial is harder to attached to air particles than the fog particles. It mainly the same with the closed chamber solution. But there is no small evaporative humidifier. So if you don’t have large space, just use closed chamber, add water and let the water naturally evaporates into the air to add humidity