AZSid
Member
- Joined
- Aug 27, 2015
- Messages
- 71
Just wondering if my little Remi is on the right growth path. She is approximately 6 weeks old and weighs 57.5 grams as of today after urinating and defecating, though I have not noticed any urates in the past week or so.
She is currently housed in a 2x4' pen with moist ZooMed coconut fiber substrate with bits of grass growing here and there. We live in Southern AZ with a swamp cooler which helps with the humidity and even having the top off the table during the day, humidity stays at roughly 85% throughout the day and rises to between 90-97% for a few hours after misting the substrate every day. At night, the top goes back on the table to help keep it dark and keep the remaining warmth in. The temp stays near 80 on the far end of her pen and her basking light warms the ambient on the other end up a few degrees with a temp between 99-103 directly under the light. She has a hide that mostly goes unnoticed to her except as something to climb on. (She thinks she's a mountain climber!) She doesn't burrow either though... She seems perfectly content to nap under her light during the day and in a corner at night. Though she has a shallow water dish that gets rinsed and replaced daily, she has no interest in drinking from it. It's just another obstacle for her to drag substrate through on her jaunts around the perimeter. But from the amount she urinates, I'm not so concerned with hydration. When we got her at three weeks old, she did have rather dark, tough, leathery skin on her legs, but that has changed radically in the past 6 weeks and her skin has lightened and become softer looking. I attribute this to her almost daily soaks. Her food is also pretty wet as she is eating romaine and arugula that we wet down so that the mashed up ZM Grassland Tortoise Food will stick. Her food is sprinkled with ZM calcium twice a week and I will be getting her a cuttlebone on my next trip to the pet store. She also just today started munching on the weeds outside on her daily stroll through the yard. This was huge for us as she previously ignored all the grass and weeds out there. My husband joked that I would of course pick out the one tortoise that wants to go on a jog everyday as before when we put her out, she would haul *** across the yard and we were having to chase her down before she got to the edge of the property.
Remington is ridiculously active, eats like a champ, and seems to be doing well but as a new tortoise owner, I'm paranoid. Is she gaining enough weight? Does her shell look okay? Should I...? Does she...? I spend literally hours a day reading through threads on this forum and want to thank everyone for their information and expertise.
This was her at about 4 weeks old.
She is currently housed in a 2x4' pen with moist ZooMed coconut fiber substrate with bits of grass growing here and there. We live in Southern AZ with a swamp cooler which helps with the humidity and even having the top off the table during the day, humidity stays at roughly 85% throughout the day and rises to between 90-97% for a few hours after misting the substrate every day. At night, the top goes back on the table to help keep it dark and keep the remaining warmth in. The temp stays near 80 on the far end of her pen and her basking light warms the ambient on the other end up a few degrees with a temp between 99-103 directly under the light. She has a hide that mostly goes unnoticed to her except as something to climb on. (She thinks she's a mountain climber!) She doesn't burrow either though... She seems perfectly content to nap under her light during the day and in a corner at night. Though she has a shallow water dish that gets rinsed and replaced daily, she has no interest in drinking from it. It's just another obstacle for her to drag substrate through on her jaunts around the perimeter. But from the amount she urinates, I'm not so concerned with hydration. When we got her at three weeks old, she did have rather dark, tough, leathery skin on her legs, but that has changed radically in the past 6 weeks and her skin has lightened and become softer looking. I attribute this to her almost daily soaks. Her food is also pretty wet as she is eating romaine and arugula that we wet down so that the mashed up ZM Grassland Tortoise Food will stick. Her food is sprinkled with ZM calcium twice a week and I will be getting her a cuttlebone on my next trip to the pet store. She also just today started munching on the weeds outside on her daily stroll through the yard. This was huge for us as she previously ignored all the grass and weeds out there. My husband joked that I would of course pick out the one tortoise that wants to go on a jog everyday as before when we put her out, she would haul *** across the yard and we were having to chase her down before she got to the edge of the property.
Remington is ridiculously active, eats like a champ, and seems to be doing well but as a new tortoise owner, I'm paranoid. Is she gaining enough weight? Does her shell look okay? Should I...? Does she...? I spend literally hours a day reading through threads on this forum and want to thank everyone for their information and expertise.
This was her at about 4 weeks old.