teallen
New Member
Hi, I'm looking for some advice on my hermann's shell health. Today I was cleaning around her tail because some poop had gotten stuck, and I noticed the shell in that area felt a little bit soft. When I pressed on that area of her shell, it felt like it gave way slightly under the light pressure. A bit like if you press on the end of a soft fingernail. Visually, I haven't noticed any difference, but I'll take another look in the daylight tomorrow.
Every other part of her shell feels solid, and her behaviour hasn't changed. There's a bit of give when I press on her plastron, but she's only 8 months and it feels more like tuppaware, definitely not spongey, so I wasn't worried about this. Her shell is smooth, her spine is quite noticeable but once again I read this was normal.
She's gaining weight consistently (almost always 3g a week, and according to the jackson ratio she's within healthy weight, if slightly on the heavy side)
Care info, to save people asking:
Diet-wise, she's eating supermarket greens at the moment because it's the middle of winter. Mostly lambs lettuce, and then kale, watercress, red lettuce etc on some days for a bit of variety. She gets calcium powder every day, nutrobal once a week. Her poos have been a bit soft recently, but nothing too bad.
Lighting wise, she has a 160w MVB. I know this isn't recommended on this forum, but there's so much conflicting info out there, it's what I ended up with. Currently it's seemed to be working for me, I'll probably swap to seperate heat/UV once it comes to the end of it's life. It comes on at 6:30am because that's when I feed her in the morning, but she's not a morning tort - she doesn't come out of her hide til around 9am. And then it goes off at 7pm, which is around the time she goes to bed. Under the lamp the temp is usually around 32°C, the "cool" end tends to be around 25°. At nighttime I do worry the temp might drop a bit low, I'm in the UK and we've had a few cold nights. But she's almost always buried and so hopefully this doesn't affect her too much.
I bath her for 15-20mins every evening, and while I do this I spray her enclosure. She's on coco coir and humidity tends to be around 60-70%. I spray enough so the substrate is damp, but not wet.
You can see her spine ridge in this photo:
This photo is about 2 weeks old - I won't be able to take an updated one til tomorrow as she's buried herself for the night:
Here's a top down photo of her whole shell:
Can anyone help? Is there anything I need to change or keep an eye on? It's hard to say if this is a recent change or not because I don't remember really pressing on that part of her shell before, but I think I would have noticed it. All the info online seems to be talking about the shell as a whole, not just 1 part of it as seems to be happening here. I hope I'm overly worried and it's not anything too bad, and sorry if I've gone into too much detail. I just really love this lil gal and wanna make sure she's okay ahah.
Every other part of her shell feels solid, and her behaviour hasn't changed. There's a bit of give when I press on her plastron, but she's only 8 months and it feels more like tuppaware, definitely not spongey, so I wasn't worried about this. Her shell is smooth, her spine is quite noticeable but once again I read this was normal.
She's gaining weight consistently (almost always 3g a week, and according to the jackson ratio she's within healthy weight, if slightly on the heavy side)
Care info, to save people asking:
Diet-wise, she's eating supermarket greens at the moment because it's the middle of winter. Mostly lambs lettuce, and then kale, watercress, red lettuce etc on some days for a bit of variety. She gets calcium powder every day, nutrobal once a week. Her poos have been a bit soft recently, but nothing too bad.
Lighting wise, she has a 160w MVB. I know this isn't recommended on this forum, but there's so much conflicting info out there, it's what I ended up with. Currently it's seemed to be working for me, I'll probably swap to seperate heat/UV once it comes to the end of it's life. It comes on at 6:30am because that's when I feed her in the morning, but she's not a morning tort - she doesn't come out of her hide til around 9am. And then it goes off at 7pm, which is around the time she goes to bed. Under the lamp the temp is usually around 32°C, the "cool" end tends to be around 25°. At nighttime I do worry the temp might drop a bit low, I'm in the UK and we've had a few cold nights. But she's almost always buried and so hopefully this doesn't affect her too much.
I bath her for 15-20mins every evening, and while I do this I spray her enclosure. She's on coco coir and humidity tends to be around 60-70%. I spray enough so the substrate is damp, but not wet.
You can see her spine ridge in this photo:
This photo is about 2 weeks old - I won't be able to take an updated one til tomorrow as she's buried herself for the night:
Here's a top down photo of her whole shell:
Can anyone help? Is there anything I need to change or keep an eye on? It's hard to say if this is a recent change or not because I don't remember really pressing on that part of her shell before, but I think I would have noticed it. All the info online seems to be talking about the shell as a whole, not just 1 part of it as seems to be happening here. I hope I'm overly worried and it's not anything too bad, and sorry if I've gone into too much detail. I just really love this lil gal and wanna make sure she's okay ahah.
