Taking cues...

[seiff]

So aside from the care sheets, how much do people vary enclosure parameters based on activity? I've got 2 small Hermanns in a 5x2x2 closed chamber and have noticed activity is down since dropping temps to a normal range, 78 cold end, 84 warm end, 110 basking spot (it's hot but they use it occasionally). I also noticed that they sleep dug in on the warm side where it's less humid. Dry side's about 50%, damp side about 70%. Should I up the temp by a bit? I can probably do it by adding 2 small ceramics that stay on 24/7 in lieu of a single night bulb...

 

[Yvonne G]

Care sheets should be used as a guideline, and not as the bible. Each person has to modify their habitats to suit your own climate and tortoise's needs.

 

[Tom]

Yes it is good to take a cue from the animals behavior, but there are many factors to consider.

You temps are quite warm for this temperate species. I would not keep the basking spot so hot. It will contribute to carapace desiccation and lead to pyramiding. Yours might be hiding to escape the mid day heat. This is what they would do in the wild too.

There are many reasons why they might be hiding. Living as a pair is stressful and not good for either of them.

There are many reasons why they might choose to dig in over on the drier side too. It likely has more to do with security or temperature than moisture.

 

[seiff]

That's why I posed the question, it seems odd that they preferred it when it was even warmer. They're almost always on the warmer side... And they don't hide during their day cycle, they're always out... on the warm side!

 

[tglazie]

I don't know, me, personally? I've never been able to get an indoor setup just right for tortoises. I keep margies, and they always hate it indoors. I used a series of 6 foot diameter kiddie pools with a removable wire and plastic impermeable frame over top to hold in the heat and humidity. I keep the temperature comparatively low in these enclosures (65 cold side, 75 warm side, 85 basking spot), given that the only time I use them is late autumn and early spring. As soon as the weather is good, I let the torts outdoors, bringing them indoors should the temp fall below fifty five at night. During the sunny days, even if the temp only reaches the upper sixties, I still put them out for a few hours, as I find they're usually more than capable of handling a drop into the fifties for a few hours before sunset.

As for your troubles with the indoor setup, my tortoises spend a ridiculous amount of time basking beneath the lights, and mine did this regardless of temperature. I used to have the temp running at 95, but they just laid under the lamps, getting dehydrated, producing inordinate amounts of uric acid during their daily baths. To me, this wasn't acceptable, so I lowered the wattage of my bulbs. As a result, the basking temp only rises to eighty five, and the tortoises still spend the better part of their day beneath the lamps in a most unnatural state. I've never been able to get this right, despite numerous experiments raising humidity, lowering humidity, raising and lowering temperature, trying different substrates, etc. I keep my tortoises in the garage, so they are spared some of the negative aspects of my home ventilation system, but the time they don't spend sleeping in their hides at night or behaving like cabbages resting beneath the lights they spend attempting to scale the walls of the kiddie pool. There's just something about being indoors that deprives these torts of their positive life experience, which makes sense when one considers the myriad factors absent from an indoor setup that would be ever present in an outdoor setup.

I do believe my beasts grow very bored in their limited indoor space. Outdoors, each animal is allowed a space measuring, at the very least, five by eighteen. This space allows me to plant the enclosures, isolating parts of the enclosure to allow seedlings to mature, rotating grazing areas like a farmer with cows (well, not quite, but you get the idea). I recently enlarged my female marginated run to thirty by thirty, with some new planted, hilly spaces that I hope they will utilize for egg laying. This sort of thing simply can't be replicated indoors, lest one keeps a reptile house like the zoo. But even so, I feel that there's also the matter of air circulation and atmospheric layering. Plants in a natural, outdoor state are far more vibrant than they could ever be in an indoor setup, and variable solar exposure creating luminal variation over an entire day, along with winds periodically disrupting settled air flow, invariably of a higher humidity than the air in any house (lest one lives in a true desert, of course)... all of these countless factors contribute to outdoor environments ultimately being superior, to the extent that I've found any indoor accommodation I've ever tried to be woefully inadequate.

If outdoor accommodation is impossible, then I apologize for not being much help. Perhaps someone else can offer advice in this regard. But if this setup is just a temporary one, the result of weather, then I wouldn't worry too much. Indoor housing has been the bane of my tortoise keeping existence. It's one of the reasons I'm such a proponent of refrigerator brumation, given that I hate seeing my tortoises looking miserable beneath a heat lamp in what I would consider a tiny enclosure. The months spent brumating cut down on the need for this housing set up rather substantially.

T.G.

 

[Tom]

Very good points T.G.

I like to keep small babies mostly indoors, but once they are big enough, I can't stand having any of them inside. All of my older tropical tortoises live outside full time and I too hibernate my russians in a fridge when the days get short and the temps too low. Just brought them back out over the weekend, and they are pigging out as if they were asleep all winter... oh wait...

 

[cmacusa3]

I think it also depends on what the tort likes. I moved my sully to a bigger closed chamber enclosure because he was growing fast and very active in the first enclosure. I put my Leo in the old enclosure with the same set up that my sully was in, the Leo wasn't very active for a while and didn't eat well so I dropped the temps just a few degree's still over 80 at all times and it was an immediate change in behavior. I like to think it was the temp change and I got it the way he wanted it. Like Yvonne stated, I think the care sheets work as guidance and once you figure out the best way to do things it's about finding what is best for that individual tort.

 

[cmacusa3]

and I love this enclosure Seiff

 

[mini_max]

I have a chronic basker too. Maybe lower the basking and up the overall. When ours was a little younger he used to get more active when the whole enclosure was low 80 s. If yours are babies, they may benefit from less of a range.

 

[tglazie]

Yes indeed, Tom. Babies, I find, are a different story. They're so fragile, especially at that early hatchling stage. I keep three fifty five gallon aquaria with heated water that house some southern painted turtles, and I use these to establish the high humidity I require by placing some sterlite shoe boxes on the screen tops and placing atop those boxes a larger, food processing container I bought at a restaurant supply store. It behaves in a similar manner to the water jacket incubators of old. The humidity remains high, the temperature is stable around eighty at noon and seventy five at midnight, and the babies get to spend most of their time sleeping, as they would in nature. I remove the sterlite container around lunch time and use a small forty watt bulb heat bulb to raise their temperature. After a warm bath and a few minutes under the bulb, they are usually ready to eat. I feed them on a flat quarter floor tile, turn off the light when they're finished, then place them back into the aquarium humidified cold frame. All of my aquaria are on the south facing side of the house, so the sun percolates through the windows quite nicely, offering the babies a normal day and night cycle. Once they pass that early three month stage, I move them outside for a few hours per day into any of four three by ten, heavily planted, screen covered, regularly watered runs with a singular, highly attractive shelter to which I condition them to regular use (I always move them to the shelter near dusk; I find that if I move them there regularly enough, they eventually move there on their own). When they are this young, I put them out for only a few hours in the early morning. South Texas is hot, despite the fact that these guys' enclosure is partially shaded by a large mulberry, so I remove them to the comfort of their indoor coldframe by lunchtime, which gives them an ample five hours to bask, graze, then retreat to their shelter. Eventually, once my margie babes reach the two inch mark, I keep them outdoors all day, but bring them in at night into a kiddie pool shelter as I described for my adults. Eventually, when they've passed four or five inches, I leave them outdoors full time during the spring, summer, and fall.

This system has worked quite well for me with marginated and Greek tortoises here in South Texas. The tortoises behave in a seasonal pattern, maintaining an almost hyperactive level of activity during the spring and late autumn months (coming up is simply my favorite time of year; the weather is wonderful from a human perspective, and the tortoises go nuts with their spring feeding following emergence from brumation and their zeal to breed and chase invaders from their territory), while keeping to sluggish homebody behavior at the high heat of summer when the occasional rain storm is greeted by that most unseasonable flurry of activity. I'm honestly in awe of anyone who keeps these beasts north of the Oklahoma/Missouri border, given the elaborate indoor setups they must create to ensure survival of their charges. Chris and Gary are two such guys. I mean, they've managed to successfully keep and breed a wide array of species in New Jersey and New York, a couple spots that are currently buried in over a foot of snow. It hasn't snowed here in South Texas in decades. Were it not for the wonderful climate of Bexar county, I don't know how I would manage this group of beasties. I mean, I just got back from the house, and the tortoise paddocks have warmed to a sunny ground temperature of seventy eight, and the whole crew is loving every minute of it, chowing down on the hibiscus and chinese lanterns I picked for them earlier today.

T.G.