New sulcata owner help

[Stevoluvmunchkin]

I recently bought my first sulcata and I have a few questions. He is a baby still and is maybe 4 or 5 inches long. My first question would be what kind of substrate is best ? He is currently on alfalfa pellets because that is what the lady at the reptile convention told me to use. Also what is the best UVB? I'm currently using a compact fluorescent but not one that is coiled. I would like to switch to a MVB but I have read that they don't last as long as fluorescents and at 45$ a bulb that doesn't sound too great. Also I have read that you shouldn't feed sulcatas greens but he is not liking the hay so what should I feed him?

 

[rearlpettway]

This is from Tom from this group.
I added a few points from my own experience.

Sulcata Hatchling and Yearling (1-5 years old) Care


What follows is Toms preferred current method of raising hatchling and yearling Sulcata tortoises

Indoor housing:

It must be noted that we now know sulcatas babies hatch during the start of the rainy season in Africa. It is hot, wet, rainy, very humid, and there are puddles and marshes everywhere. Yes the area is dry for 8-9 months out of the year, but it is a swamp during hatching season. During the dry season, Sulcata's spend 95%-98% of their time underground in warm, humid burrows. This information comes directly from the mouth of my friend Tomas Diagne. He is the founder of the African Chelonian Institute in Senegal Africa. He was born and raised there and has been studying wild sulcatas in their native range since he was a little boy. Keeping your hatchling in a dry, desert-like enclosure, is a big mistake and an invitation to disaster. It is also very un-natural for these animals. Imagine what would happen to an earthworm in a hot, dry enclosure with dry substrate. The same thing happens to the INSIDE of a baby tortoise. Your enclosure should be maintained such that an earthworm could live in it just as well as a hatchling tortoise. A damp substrate (80% relative humidity), a water bowl, and a humid hide (100% relative humidity) should all be pre-requisites. Along with this, warm temps day and night are necessary. Sulcatas are NOT prone to shell rot at all, and they do not get respiratory infections in these damp conditions as long as temps are kept up. I shoot for no lower than 80 degrees day or night year round. Adults can tolerate colder temps in some circumstances, but this care sheet is for hatchlings and babies and is aimed at helping them thrive, not just survive.

Heating and UVA/UVB Lighting:

We recommend ZooMed PowerSun Mercury Vapor UVA/UVB 100 W bulb for heating and lighting.

The Actual Enclosure:

I have not been able to make any open topped enclosure work to my satisfaction. Low sided open topped enclosures like tortoise tables are the worst. No amount of covering, or attempts to slow heat and humidity loss have worked well for us. There is just no way to keep the warm humid air where you want it. For about the last year and a half, I have only been using closed chambers and I couldn't be happier with them. They use a lot less electricity because all of your heat and humidity is trapped with nowhere to go. It also makes maintaining warm night temps a snap. Open tops allow all your warm humid air to escape up and into the room where your enclosure sits. Even if you cover most of the top, the heat lamps create a chimney effect and draw your heat and humidity up and out. Having the heat lamps outside, or on top of, the enclosure also lets the majority of the electricity you are using to produce heat float up up and away... A closed chamber can be made by covering the top of a tub or tank and minimizing ventilation, but its not easy and you burn more electricity. It works best if all the heating and lighting equipment is INSIDE the enclosure with the tortoise. Maintaining a small open topped box at 80 degrees with 80% humidity in a regular sized room that is 70 degrees and 20% humidity is VERY difficult, if not impossible in a practical sense. A closed chamber makes it easy.
You need to know, and periodically adjust your temperatures. You need to regularly check warm side, cool side, basking spot and night temps, and adjust as needed. Every enclosure is different and they even change with the seasons in most households. It is not enough to plop a bulb on top and walk away. Check those temps, and make adjustments, preferably BEFORE the baby even comes home. I like to use an infrared temp gun AND remote probed thermometers for this purpose. Check your temps early and often.

Enclosure size:

Simply put: The bigger the better. I start babies in a 4x8' closed chamber. As a minimum, I would suggest no smaller than 48"x18" for a tiny hatchling. They need room to roam around. Once you put in the food and water bowls, the humid hide, and any decorations or potted plants, there is hardly any room left over to walk. Tortoises do not tend to do as well when stuffed into small enclosures. For a sulcata, even 4x8' is only going to last a year or two. You might get three years with slower growing sulcata.

Humid Hide Boxes:

This offers the tortoise a more humid place to retreat to and sleep and can simulate some of the more damp micro-climates they might utilize in the wild. It is as simple as getting a $2 black dishwashing tub from Walmart, flipping it upside down and cutting out a small door hole. I keep the substrate under the tub more damp than the surrounding substrate and it works great. You can also use plastic shoe boxes. Some people like to put sphagnum moss in their hides or attach a sponge to the top. This is all fine, but I usually don't bother. This is a short paragraph, but this is a very important detail that should not be overlooked.

Substrate:

We recommend coco coir.
We recommend against wood shavings or chips, ground walnut shell, corn cob bedding, rabbit pellets, compressed grass pellet bedding, newspaper pellets, hay, cedar, or any amount of sand.
We change the coconut coir once a year and at the end of the year the coconut coir has no smell and no fungal growth.

Water bowls:

Plastic lid from a plastic food storage container. They have low sides and they are shallow so your tortoise won't drown if it happens to flip over and land upside down in the water bowl. No harm in having two water bowls, by the way. Do NOT use the typical ramped pet store bowls. These can literally be death traps for tortoises. Clean as often as needed. The more they track food and substrate into it, and the more they poop in it, the better. This means they are comfortable using their bowl, and that is great news. Just rinse and refill as many times a day as you need to.

Soaking:

I recommend hatchlings be soaked in 85-95 degree water for 20-30 minutes once a day. I use a tall sided opaque tub and keep the water depth about a third of the way up the body. If you have a humid enclosure with a humid hide and a water bowl, it is totally fine to skip a day here and there. Soaking only once a week and using a dry enclosure is not enough in my opinion, and I would not buy a hatchling that had been started that way. Once the tortoise gets to about 4" I relax a bit on the soaking routine and gradually taper it down as they gain size.



Pyramiding:

I will simply state here what I know to be true based on my experience, my experiments, conversations with people who live in Africa and study African tortoises, people who have kept them for decades here in the U.S., and personal observations.
There are many things listed as causes of pyramiding. I can refute each one with multiple examples. Lack of UV, lack of calcium, too much protein, too much food, the wrong foods, fast growth, wrong temperatures, small enclosures, not enough exercise, indoor housing, etc. None of these factors CAUSES pyramiding. They can all be somehow related to it, but they don't cause it. Simply put, pyramiding is caused by growth in conditions that are too dry. This is true for any species of tortoise, even the ones that don't typically pyramid. To prevent pyramiding I use a closed chamber and keep the ambient temperature 80 or higher all the time, I keep humidity around 80%, I offer a humid hide that holds 95-100% humidity, I soak daily to ensure good hydration, and I spray the carapace with plain water several times a day. Sulcatas hatch during the African rainy season. It is hot, humid, rainy and marshy. It makes no sense to keep them in a dry box, with dry substrate, and a hot desiccating bulb overhead. Simulating this rainy season can produce Sulcata babies with smooth shells. So please, don't keep sulcatas in desert-style enclosures. It is not healthy for them. They are not the least bit prone to shell rot, like some other species are, and they DO NOT get respiratory infections from high humidity as long as temps are 80 or higher everywhere in the enclosure, day and night.
Tom has raised hundreds of hatchlings in this manner with no problems.



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[rearlpettway]

Feed him spring mix greens and ZooMed Grassland Tortoise Food.


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[Tom]

These threads will answer all your questions, and hopefully help with other things too.
http://www.tortoiseforum.org/threads/how-to-raise-a-healthy-sulcata-or-leopard-version-2-0.79895/
http://www.tortoiseforum.org/threads/for-those-who-have-a-young-sulcata.76744/
http://www.tortoiseforum.org/threads/beginner-mistakes.45180/

To answer your questions specifically:
1. I prefer orchid bark for baby sulcatas.
2. The best UV bulb is the SUN. Make a proper safe enclosure outside and get your baby out there for a couple hours a day. Even just 30 minute a couples times a week is enough, but more is better. MVBs produce FAR more UV than all but the HO type florescent bulbs. They are worth the money and all of the available UV bulbs need to be monitored for UV output and regularly replaced anyway. If you will be relying on indoor UV for months out of every year then you NEED a UV meter. I like this one: https://www.solarmeter.com/model65.html
If you can use some real sunshine on a regular basis, you don't need indoor UV. I would not use any compact florescent bulb over a tortoise enclosure.
3. Greens are fine. It depends on WHICH greens you are talking about and what you add to them. Romaine alone is not adequate. Romaine mixed with grass clippings, mulberry leaves, dandelions, grape leaves and some sow thistle, is an excellent meal. Most sulcatas will not eat plain dry hay until they are over 12" long, and even then some don't care for it. The middle thread above will explain this in more detail for you.

Welcome to the forum. I hope we can help.

 

[rearlpettway]

Go to the Sulcata section. Look at the top of the Sulcata section for Tom's entire care sheet. I just copied and pasted what you asked for.


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[Stevoluvmunchkin]

Thanks everyone! I guess what I am feeding him is not considered hay. Its the grassland tortoise food and I usually give him the tortoise bites as well ( those orange jelly things you can buy from the petstore). I do have a nice fences in backyard so I could take him outside for his uvb. How many time a week should I take him out? And you mentions grass clippings, is it safe to use grass from my backyard? Is there someplace online I could buy dandelion and other flowers that my sulcata would enjoy?Also is coco coir the same stuff as ecoearth? Again I am really sorry about all of the questions.

 

[Tom]

Please DON'T be sorry for lots and lots of questions! Keep asking and learn as much as you can. If you ask people in your neighborhood or work tortoise questions, they might eventually get annoyed. But HERE, on the tortoise forum, we LOVE talking about tortoises all day and night. So just keep reading, learning and asking everything that comes to mind. Chances are good that other people reading are wondering the same thing.

Grassland is good stuff, but few tortoises will eat it plain. I soak a pellet or two and mix it in with leafy greens. Feed out the rest of the orange jelly things as part of a varied diet, but I would not buy those again.

Your tortoise needs an outdoor enclosure of some sort. Loose in the yard is a recipe for disaster. (Read the beginner mistakes thread.) There are many ways to accomplish this. Here are some ideas:
http://www.tortoiseforum.org/thread...table-but-safe-outdoor-baby-enclosures.30683/
http://www.tortoiseforum.org/threads/daisys-new-enclosure.28662/

Everyday sunshine for an hour or two is best, but do as much as you can. As they gain size I leave them out longer and longer, weather permitting. By the time they are 5-6" I leave them out all day and bring them in to sleep. I only leave small ones outside for an hour or two. Outside they have bushes to hide in and under, weeds and grass to graze, and lots of hiding places and shade. Here is an enclosure for an example:
http://www.tortoiseforum.org/threads/leopard-land.30151/

Grass from the yard is perfect as long as it has not had chemicals on it. Fertilizers, insecticides, weed n' feeds with herbicides, etc... I chop it up super fine and sprinkle it all over the greens for the day. Sometimes it helps to wet the greens and then mix it all in.

Most people grow their own stuff to insure it isn't laced with chemicals. If you are going to be a tortoise keeper (Especially a sulcata!), you'll need to do some gardening too. Here is one product that I really like: http://www.tortoisesupply.com/HerbalHay $25 might sound expensive, but that amount will last your tortoise a full year or more and its really good stuff.

Coco coir is the same as "Eco-Earth", but that is not my favorite for sulcatas. It can work, but its very messy for them. Plus if you buy the stuff from a pet store it will cost you a lot to get enough for a large sulcata enclosure. By the way, for a 5" sulcata your enclosure needs to be around 4x8'. That will take many many bricks of Eco-Earth. If you decide to use coco coir, you can buy it in bulk at a plant nursery much cheaper.

 

[Yvonne G]

Welcome to the forum!

 

[Stevoluvmunchkin]

Hello Tom! That herbal hay was exactly what I was looking for! Do you feed it to them dry or do you add water to re-hydrate and should I add this on top of spring mix or just by itself? You use pathway bark by western organics right? I had read that that has some pine in it and that pine was toxic, I can get pure cypress mulch cheapy if that is a good option. I also measured and I was way off, he is only between 2 and 3 inches long. When I move him outside is it ok to keep him in a big screened in porch inside of a big kiddie pool or does the screen block out too much uvb?

 

[Tank'sMom]

Welcome! Glad you found this forum because it sounds like you got some bad info! You're in good hands here. Tom's da bomb!

 

[lismar79]

I mix my herbal hay with greens and spray it so it all sticks together.

 

[Stevoluvmunchkin]

Thanks! I am glad too! I try to join a forum every time I get a new reptile. I usually do all of my research before buying one but my husband thought it was adorable and bought it at one of the reptile conventions :-\. I just want the best for him and I want to make sure I do everything right.