I am wondering what is the best medium for marking the carapace of torts? I have 6 black mountain torts that I want to track growth on.

Do you mean marking each individual tortoise to distinguish it from the others? Or do you mean tracing each tortoise on a piece of paper to show how much he's grown?

An accepted way to mark tortoises is to take a small triangular file and file a notch in a marginal scute. One notch for this tortoise, two notches for that one. A notch on the other side for that one, etc. Just be careful to not go too deeply.

Another way people mark their tortoises is to drop a small drop of nail polish in the very center of a scute. One drop, two drops, a pink drop, a red drop, etc.

When you have a lot of one type of tortoise, like you do, its always a good idea to have them identified, so you can be sure each one is getting his fair share of food, etc.


Yvonne

Hi there,

Id go for the nail varnish as mentioned above - I personally would not like to file into a tortoises shell.

I'll go with polish. Chalk and livestock crayon was quite literally a wash. LOL

I agree, I use nail polish on mine and would never cut into the shell as it is living tissue and as such open to infection and even worse, pain to the tortoise. I think here in UK this would be illegal, must check on that for future reference.
Take care
Sue

If you will notice, I did caution against cutting in too deeply. Notching a marginal scute is standard practice with zoos and scientific studies:

http://www.azgfd.gov/pdfs/w_c/tortoise/M...otocol.pdf

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob...&_user=10&

http://www.jstor.org/pss/3892905

http://www.desertfishes.org/cuatroc/orga...rtles.html

http://www.jwildlifedis.org/cgi/reprint/37/3/427.pdf

Yvonne

I simply used a sharpie ink pen on one of the marginal scutes and its been almost a year (on an outside adult DT) and it is still there. By the way I have three DT and they are marked 1,2,3. And Sharpies come in all kind of colors now.