Errata

So I am looking for insights and any related experiences to guide me. I have a four year old male Marginated tortoise. Soaked when young, feed a mixed diet of weeds, mulberry and opuntia. I am unaware of any issues with husbandry. Yet, the anterior coastal scutes are concave. Like this:



There is no pyramiding, no other visible issues. The only variation from best practice I can think of is that he has not had as much of a night cool down in my turtle room. Temps in mid 70s.
Any ideas out there?

@tglazie Knows this species well.

Fascinating. I've seen this feature on all of my animals, and it only seems to differ by degree and angle of concavity. One of my males, Joey, has particularly pronounced dimples where the anterior coastal and marginal scutes meet, so much so that they actually form a concave deep depression that can fit the tip of a chopstick. All of them seem to have some form of it. Your tortoise's features seem to be quite pronounced. Now, as for the cause and whether or not it is husbandry related in it's origin, that I couldn't say. Do you have any wider pictures of the guy? Maybe morphology of the posterior carapace can lend a clue. Perhaps someone with greater knowledge concerning shell growth and development could advise.

T.G.

tglazie said:

Fascinating. I've seen this feature on all of my animals, and it only seems to differ by degree and angle of concavity. One of my males, Joey, has particularly pronounced dimples where the anterior coastal and marginal scutes meet, so much so that they actually form a concave deep depression that can fit the tip of a chopstick. All of them seem to have some form of it. Your tortoise's features seem to be quite pronounced. Now, as for the cause and whether or not it is husbandry related in it's origin, that I couldn't say. Do you have any wider pictures of the guy? Maybe morphology of the posterior carapace can lend a clue. Perhaps someone with greater knowledge concerning shell growth and development could advise.

T.G.

Click to expand...

Thanks so much for your insights. Have you noticed any difference between individuals raised indoors vs outside?

I wouldn't reduce it to outside vs. inside, given that there appear to be more factors than that. Keep in mind that this is reflective of my own personal experience raising these tortoises in South Texas, so these insights will be highly reflective of my particular region. So, here goes. When I first got Marginated tortoises in the nineties as hatchlings, I was reading a lot of Brian Pursall and Andy Highfield, and all of these sources basically argued that hatchlings and adults should be treated the same (given that they hatched into the same environment, the logic went; this was a massive oversimplification, as it turns out), and that outdoor housing was best. So that's what I did. Ultimately, I ended up losing about a dozen baby marginated tortoises doing this. Outdoors can be a very unforgiving place for hatchlings, and even with access to a water bowl, the Texas heat and my failure to soak the animals more than once or twice per week led to a lot of these kiddos perishing from dehydration, something that I failed to understand until my ladies started producing babies of their own and I had a greater understanding of the importance of hydration and regular soaks.

Despite my initially shoddy methods that became more refined as the years progressed, my region was blessed with relatively high humidity, despite our going through a drought. This ensured that my charges grew up without suffering from pyramiding that is typical of tortoises raised indoors on dry substrates with low relative humidity, so Big Gino, my largest male, despite having suffered some of my more inexpert attempts at tortoise keeping, grew up to be incredibly smooth and comparable to his wild counterparts.

Now, the first babies I raised up, I raised them mostly outdoors with soaks every morning. I would transport them into a humid covered container at night, not so much with a mind at maintaining smooth growth, but more to the mind of keeping them safe from potential predators (years ago, I lost three baby sulcatas to a skunk that had burrowed through their perimeter wall, and since that time, I've been paranoid). Despite this method, my tortoises were coming up pyramided. My first hatchling, Champers, who is now under the care of a dear friend of mine, she had this unfortunate deformity that resulted in a spinal depression between her thrid and fourth vertebral scute. This combined with slight rounded pyramiding proved unsightly. I now attribute the cause of this to the dryness of that year. You see, I was leaving these babies outside all day. They basically consumed all the graze in their small two foot by six foot enclosure, so I stopped watering the plants in and around the enclosure every day. I would refresh the water bowl, pluck some lambs lettuce, chickory, whatever weeds were around and available, throw it into a pile with the tortoises following their morning bath, and I would just leave them be until the evening. Basically, they were exposed to the relative harshness of the environment, and it showed up in their growth. Now, my last clutch of that summer, the kids who hatched in August, they didn't get this treatment. I started increasing the soaks to two soaks per day, once in the morning, once in the evening. What's more, as they hatched in August and the weather turned dreary early that September, I started keeping them indoors in my then newly constructed tortoise room. That room was always humid, even back then, given that I had a heated live stock tank in which I kept turtles while using a homemade sump filter with a particularly splashy return flow, so the humidity was always north of 65% and the temperature was always sitting comfortably between 75 and 90, depending upon outside conditions and the timing of the heat lamps.

Now, when I raised the August babies in that environment over the winter, they grew up smooth, without the same rounded pyramiding and carapacial deformity present in those first babies. However, as the winter months went on, I developed a new problem. I started to notice that the new babies vertebral scutes started to not grow as quickly as the marginal scutes. As they grew older and larger, this problem seemed to progress further and further. Now, I'm not sure exactly why this occurs, but I've since corrected the problem in my new hatchlings, and I can attribute it to any number of factors.

Okay, so here's what I learned from this. First, keeping hatchlings outdoors for more than a few hours in the morning is probably not a good idea, and it is definitely not a good idea in inclement weather (hot or cold). As a result, my standard practice now is to put babies outdoors for a few hours in the morning, allow them to browse on natural graze, then bring them indoors. When it comes to the indoor environment, first ensure that they have a good depth of substrate. Coco coir is my preferred substrate now, though I was using sifted aged top soil for a long time, and I use aged top soil for all of my adult animals in their indoor enclosures. Trouble with topsoil is that it loses moisture much more quickly than coir, and the dust it produces tends to get on stuff no matter what you do, but that's a side track, sorry. Anywho, providing an adequate depth of soil allows for several things. First, you can bury potted plants into the environment. This is, in my view, critical. Plants are great as both a potential food source and they are great for cover. Deep soil is also good for cover. Basically, you want to create an environment that has no shortage of hiding places that can be readily humidified by sprayer or tightness of concealment. I've since come to believe that baby tortoises grow strangely if they are prone to boredom and just sitting around eating. I haven't noticed this problem in sulcatas or tropical tortoises, but I have definitely noticed it in Mediterraneans and it seems especially pronounced in marginated tortoises. I've seen so many animals with these long marginal scutes that run down the sides of the tortoise like whale ribs while the tiny vertebral scutes form small scale like plates down the back. But yes, plants are important, indoors, but especially outdoors. I've since redesigned my baby paddock to be larger (4x8 now), which allows for more planting. I find that when I plant an enclosure, I'm much more inclined to water it to ensure that the plants do well. This enriches the environment for babies all around, offering them a variety of hiding areas and opportunities to feed.

Ultimately, I find, neither dogmatic approach has really worked for me, i.e. indoor vs. outdoor keeping. Both have a role to play in my mind. Outdoor keeping is good in the right doses depending upon the region in which you keep tortoises. Indoor keeping, though, is also an essential aspect of raising healthy baby tortoises in captivity.

T.G.