Help (not eating)

[dt1607]

Hello, new to the tortoise world. I bought this gal last week, enrolled her in pet insurance right away (still 1 weeks before it kicks in)… I offered her food the day she arrived and she ate it, but had not eat ever since. I have offered her dry and fresh veggies but still nothing. I have not seen her drink either, so I have been soaking her 30 mins every other day. I have been misting her enclosure twice a day. She has the following:

100W ceramic heat lamp
Mercury vapor bulb
Reptisand
Organic coco coir

She is not wheezing, sneezing nor has any nasal discharge. She is very sleepy and won’t move much unless picked up. I thought she was stressed from the shipping, but now I am a little concerned. Her body temp is 84F, her basking platform is 90F and the rest her enclosure varies from 70-80F (depending if the light reaches). Humidity is in the low 50%. What am I doing wrong?

 

[wellington]

Remove the sand, dangerous
Remove the mercury and replace with incandescent FLOOD bulb and a straight tube fluorescent Uvb light
Basking 95-100
Day temp should range from 75-80
Night temps 65-70
Humidity if hatchling 80% in closed chamber. If it's an adult than your humidity is good.
Give a warm water soak daily for a week if adult then can cut back. Hatchling soak daily for a year or two.

 

[SinLA]

oooof lots to change here, but the enclosure is lovely. What is the sq footage of usable space?

Please remove that water bowl its a potential death trap. Just get a cheap terra cotta saucer for water and sink it down into the substrate.

Mercury Bulbs are not good

Also she will need days if not weeks to adjust to her new space, life moves very slowly for a tortoise and they will be terrified of everything. Especially if she is from a pet store, it means she is wild caught and is probably justifiably terrified of everything that has happened to her since she was snatched out of her home.

This is a LOT to read but it will be helpful.

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[Yvonne G]

What you've described is perfectly normal behaviour. The first day they don't realize they're not going 'home' at the end of the day so they take advantage of the bountiful harvest. Then night time comes and they're still not 'home.' So now they go into full on relocation stress. Each tortoise is different, so there is no set time frame for him to snap out of it. All you can do is be loving, patient and gentle. He will eventually realize this is his new 'home' and start to settle in.

 

[Littleredfootbigredheart]

Hello and welcome! There are definitely things that need changing here as the others have pointed out, reptisand sand needs to go, as does the mercury vapour bulb. This does also look too small for an adult.

It looks like you have an adult looking at the photos, so hopefully this thread I made recently helps🙂

Housing adult Russian and Hermans indoors

Hello there! In this thread I’m going to include some information an example of an appropriate indoor set up for an older Herman/russian. As much as it’s encouraged to have tortoises in a safe outdoor enclosure, I understand being from the uk myself, that some climates make it difficult to...

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