Hi guys, so I have a sulcata that I’ve raised since a baby. Ever since I got him, I have prepared an outdoor space with heated enclosures, dig proof perimeters and lots of space with fresh grasses knowing that he would end up there when he was big enough. I live in a south Texas coastal climate with temps in the 50s-60s for winter and 85-105 the rest of the year with a 75% average humidity year round. Problem is he never got big enough. I kept him inside, in rubber maid stock tank with appropriate UV/heat. He would only eat store bought greens, which was ok as a baby, but he would never transition to hay or grass as he grew older. I figured his stunted growth was due to me making some mistakes on his environment inside and Since he’s no longer a baby, I finally moved him full time into an outdoor pen appropriate for his size but I bring him in at night when it gets a little chilly in the winter. Hes got full sun, shade, food and water. He’s been outside full time for about a year now. I still for the life of me can’t get him to eat grass or hay, unless I starve him, which isn’t healthy. I mix it with store bought greens, chop it, and every other way I can think of but he just won’t eat it. He appears active and healthy and has made some size progress in since he’s been outside. At this point I’m pretty sure I’m doing everything right as of now, but I guess my question is do these guys catch up in growth or are will he forever be doomed to be a dwarf sulcata . I have a fully outdoor set up for a 100lb sulcata, but I’m not sure he’ll ever get there. Any tips?
Help with 4” long 8yr old sulcata
- Thread starter Beebermd
- Start date
Yes. Nutrition should do it.
I had the same problem with a hatchling recently that wouldn't eat anything but small clovers outside and greens inside. The fix? Mazuri LS small tortoise. Make sure it is the LS small tortoise formula, not the regular RS until 5 lbs or so. Take a coffee mug or something and then soak a couple of pinches of the Mazuri in the mug with very hot piping water for a few minutes or until soggy. Take a fork or something and smash the Mazuri until it's the consistency of peanut butter.
A note about cutting the food. It is ridiculous the size of lettuce and such that I see on this forum from folks that expect their little ones to eat. If you watch their head in the yard as they eat clover and other things that it the maximum size that their food should be chopped up to. Sticking large pieces of greens, even though it's food, is like putting a watermelon in front of us (maybe in half) and expecting us to eat it with no hands.
Then put the size appropriate greens for the day (including chopped up grass, clovers, weeds, etc) in the mug with the smashed Mazuri in it and use the fork or whatever to mix it all up. When you feed your sulcata like this it will grow because it has the nutrition that it needs. When you combine the bite size greens including grass and weeks and the mazuri please post the results!!
I should mention that I have very little experience (under 2 years) BUT... Little Stumpy, my 1yr 9 month old sulcata is 20lbs, 14" long and is the sweetest boy that my wife and I love dearly. I wish he would stay this size but I fear he will be colossal.
I came to this revelation because my daughter bought me a hatchling this year, the figster or Figgy, that arrived in late August and was hatched at the beginning of August. Figgy weighed 48 grams and enjoyed the end of summer, eats like a pig but only clovers in the yard when he was out and chopped greens inside. This sucker is gifted with a beak and can pick out the greens that s/he wants out of any mix so I had to get creative with the Mazuri a few weeks ago to get it to eat. We're at 4 months, Figgy is finally eating all the Mazuri for 1 week. Last week s/he was 60grams and tonight weighed 75grams.
48g to 60g in a little under 4 months was comparatively slow. At 3 months old, Stump was 100g.
Even if your little one is somewhat stunted or even genetically smaller in size, if you 1) observe it drinking water and 2) feed it Mazuri every day with other food, it will grow.
I had the same problem with a hatchling recently that wouldn't eat anything but small clovers outside and greens inside. The fix? Mazuri LS small tortoise. Make sure it is the LS small tortoise formula, not the regular RS until 5 lbs or so. Take a coffee mug or something and then soak a couple of pinches of the Mazuri in the mug with very hot piping water for a few minutes or until soggy. Take a fork or something and smash the Mazuri until it's the consistency of peanut butter.
A note about cutting the food. It is ridiculous the size of lettuce and such that I see on this forum from folks that expect their little ones to eat. If you watch their head in the yard as they eat clover and other things that it the maximum size that their food should be chopped up to. Sticking large pieces of greens, even though it's food, is like putting a watermelon in front of us (maybe in half) and expecting us to eat it with no hands.
Then put the size appropriate greens for the day (including chopped up grass, clovers, weeds, etc) in the mug with the smashed Mazuri in it and use the fork or whatever to mix it all up. When you feed your sulcata like this it will grow because it has the nutrition that it needs. When you combine the bite size greens including grass and weeks and the mazuri please post the results!!
I should mention that I have very little experience (under 2 years) BUT... Little Stumpy, my 1yr 9 month old sulcata is 20lbs, 14" long and is the sweetest boy that my wife and I love dearly. I wish he would stay this size but I fear he will be colossal.
I came to this revelation because my daughter bought me a hatchling this year, the figster or Figgy, that arrived in late August and was hatched at the beginning of August. Figgy weighed 48 grams and enjoyed the end of summer, eats like a pig but only clovers in the yard when he was out and chopped greens inside. This sucker is gifted with a beak and can pick out the greens that s/he wants out of any mix so I had to get creative with the Mazuri a few weeks ago to get it to eat. We're at 4 months, Figgy is finally eating all the Mazuri for 1 week. Last week s/he was 60grams and tonight weighed 75grams.
48g to 60g in a little under 4 months was comparatively slow. At 3 months old, Stump was 100g.
Even if your little one is somewhat stunted or even genetically smaller in size, if you 1) observe it drinking water and 2) feed it Mazuri every day with other food, it will grow.
Any of the mazuri will put weight on. The LS is suppose to be better than the older recipe, but a lot of us used to only be able to use the older formula. Don't really need boiling hot water to hydrate it and you can mush it up if you want but don't need too once it's soaked it's soft and mushy as is. If he won't eat it right way then smear it on his greens. Same with adding the grass. I would wait on the hay until you can get him to eat the mazuri and grass, then add hay. Once he does eat the other stuff, start eliminating the store greens slowly until he is eating only the grass, hay, and mazuri.
Do you have a space he can graze? I don't see anything in the enclosure you show in the pic.
Also be sure to soak the hay when first trying to get him to eat it and use orchard grass hay not Timothy. Timothy is very woody and more tortoises take to the orchard.
Do you have a space he can graze? I don't see anything in the enclosure you show in the pic.
Also be sure to soak the hay when first trying to get him to eat it and use orchard grass hay not Timothy. Timothy is very woody and more tortoises take to the orchard.
Hot water will break down some of the nutrients. Better to use room temp warmer and wait a little longer.
You've got the wrong idea here. In the wild they eat large leaves. Haven't you ever seen a small tortoise eating a broadleaf plantain or mallow patch? The size and weight of the larger leaves makes it easier for them to bite off the needed bite size chunks. This also keeps their beaks in good shape and their neck and mouth muscles well exercised. If the food is soft, it doesn't matter either way. Chopping it up won't hurt anything and if people want to do that, its fine. I'm just in disagreement with your statements on food size and the logic that got you there. Experience has shown me the opposite of what you are asserting here. Also, I want to mention that chopping p some foods can cause a tortoise to choke on it, vs. allowing them to bite off their own perfectly bite-sized pieces. Please use caution going forward with this. I made a thread on this after an experienced member here lost a lovely beautiful tortoise by cutting the food into chunks for it. I don't ever want to see another tortoise choke to death on a chunk of cut up food. Here is the thread with more explanation:
Public Service Announcement - Tortoise Food Chunks
I was reminded today that not everyone knows that "hard" foods like opuntia, cucumber, carrots, or this time of year, pumpkin should not be cut up and fed in chunks. Chunks of these types of food will be swallowed whole by tortoises and can cause them to choke to death. It doesn't happen every...
tortoiseforum.org
Good info in your post other than that. I just wanted to point these things out for you and other people reading.
Most of the breeders of sulcatas all over the world mistakenly treat them like a desert species. They start babies all wrong, and a large percentage of them never pass 50 grams and die. Some get lucky and grow up normally once in the right care. Others, like yours, manage to survive, but they grow very slowly for a while, and then eventually sprout.
Part of the problem you are having is incorrect housing. Open topped enclosures are impossible to keep properly humid and warm enough. Cold temps and dry conditions make them grow very slowly. Babies sulcatas hatch in the rain during the hot humid rainy season over there. Its 100 degrees and raining, and they live under thick brush and plants. Imagine how hot and humid that would be. Like a south Florida summer day. Your baby needs 80+% humidity at all times, and a humid hide that is near 100% humidity. The temperature should never drop below 80, and ambient temperature should rise to the low 90s very day, with a basking area directly under the bulb of around 100 degrees.
Living outside slows their growth tremendously and also causes pyramiding when they do grow. I say this so you will understand that moving him outside full time, especially in fall/winter, was/is a mistake. That will slow his growth even more, and possibly make him sick. Keep your baby mostly indoors in a large closed chamber until it reaches about 10 inches. That is when I move them outside full time because they are just too big and boisterous to stay inside anymore. When I do finally move them outside, their growth stops for months, and gradually comes back, even though they have been spending hours each day in that same pen, and their night box is heated and humidified to the same temperature as their indoor closed chamber. Something about full time in the great outdoors requires some acclimation time for them to get going again. Also, I move them outside in late spring or early summer when temps are warm and its sunny every day. Going in to winter is the wrong time to do this.
Dry hay is for larger adults. I don't even start trying to introduce it until they are over 12 inches long. Grass for babies needs to be super soft, freshly sprouted grass, and you need to introduce it by finely chopping it up and mixing tiny amounts of it in with favored other greens. It takes time to introduce any new food.
Here is the care info you need to follow if you want him to grow:
The Best Way To Raise A Sulcata, Leopard, Or Star Tortoise
I chose the title of this care sheet very carefully. Are there other ways to raise babies? Yes. Yes there are, but those ways are not as good. What follows is the BEST way, according to 30 years of research and experimentation with hundreds of babies of many species. Babies hatch during the...
tortoiseforum.org
More here too:
Info For New People. Please Read This First.
Hello and welcome to tortoiseforum.org! We are all glad you are here! There is no other forum like this anywhere. We have tens of thousands of members from all over the world ranging from kids with their first tortoise to people who have been breeding and keeping high end tortoises since the...
tortoiseforum.org
I agree wholeheartedly with this. I was speaking from a size appropriate perspective of green leaves only with no stems. Not vegetables, cactus, etc. An 8 year old 4” tortoise is not looking at a full size cactus as food.Hot water will break down some of the nutrients. Better to use room temp warmer and wait a little longer.
You've got the wrong idea here. In the wild they eat large leaves. Haven't you ever seen a small tortoise eating a broadleaf plantain or mallow patch? The size and weight of the larger leaves makes it easier for them to bite off the needed bite size chunks. This also keeps their beaks in good shape and their neck and mouth muscles well exercised. If the food is soft, it doesn't matter either way. Chopping it up won't hurt anything and if people want to do that, its fine. I'm just in disagreement with your statements on food size and the logic that got you there. Experience has shown me the opposite of what you are asserting here. Also, I want to mention that chopping p some foods can cause a tortoise to choke on it, vs. allowing them to bite off their own perfectly bite-sized pieces. Please use caution going forward with this. I made a thread on this after an experienced member here lost a lovely beautiful tortoise by cutting the food into chunks for it. I don't ever want to see another tortoise choke to death on a chunk of cut up food. Here is the thread with more explanation:
Public Service Announcement - Tortoise Food Chunks
I was reminded today that not everyone knows that "hard" foods like opuntia, cucumber, carrots, or this time of year, pumpkin should not be cut up and fed in chunks. Chunks of these types of food will be swallowed whole by tortoises and can cause them to choke to death. It doesn't happen every...
Good info in your post other than that. I just wanted to point these things out for you and other people reading.
View attachment 363693
I agree with Ryan about cutting up the food. Right now I have two radiata hatchlings in a Vision cage. I chop up their food into bite-sized pieces, enough to last for three days worth of feedings. On the fourth day, when I'm out of chopped up food, if I'm too lazy to chop another three days worth (it stays good in the fridge for three days, that's how I arrived at that figure) I just grab a small handful of the un-chopped food I'm feeding the large tortoises. At the end of the day the chopped food is gone. At the end of the day feeding not chopped there's still a lot left, and the amount of not chopped was less by volume than the chopped.
I feed whole leaves with stems to hatchings. Mulberry, grape and hibiscus leaves. Weeds. And whole opuntia pads too. I find that they are able to eat these items better when left whole. They can pull against the weight of it. All of my 4 inch tortoises of all species will eat any cactus they can reach. Little ones can't eat the bark-like trunks of large mature cactus stands, but they will devour any pads that they can reach or pads that fall off.
I do chop up grocery store greens for little ones, so that I can mix in all the amendments like soaked horse hay pellets for fiber, soaked ZooMed pellets, chicken lay crumbles, calcium powder, and a wide variety of the dried leaf options that I buy from Will at Kapidolofarms.com. I chop up tender freshly sprouted grass for the babies too.
Yes. One of the main points in my first post was to allow bit sized, tender pieces of vegetation to be coated with the Mazuri ‘paste’ if you will. That is the only way I’ve found to ensure that it is gone at the end of the day for little ones.
I had forgotten about this one and learned the hard way. When Stump was small he tried to eat a piece of broccoli that was too large and when I tried to grab it out of his mouth and was ultimately successful he put his head in like the headless horseman and was trying to get away for a couple minutes at least looking like a teenager with a shirt pulled over his head. Yeah. Good times.Hot water will break down some of the nutrients. Better to use room temp warmer and wait a little longer.
You've got the wrong idea here. In the wild they eat large leaves. Haven't you ever seen a small tortoise eating a broadleaf plantain or mallow patch? The size and weight of the larger leaves makes it easier for them to bite off the needed bite size chunks. This also keeps their beaks in good shape and their neck and mouth muscles well exercised. If the food is soft, it doesn't matter either way. Chopping it up won't hurt anything and if people want to do that, its fine. I'm just in disagreement with your statements on food size and the logic that got you there. Experience has shown me the opposite of what you are asserting here. Also, I want to mention that chopping p some foods can cause a tortoise to choke on it, vs. allowing them to bite off their own perfectly bite-sized pieces. Please use caution going forward with this. I made a thread on this after an experienced member here lost a lovely beautiful tortoise by cutting the food into chunks for it. I don't ever want to see another tortoise choke to death on a chunk of cut up food. Here is the thread with more explanation:
Public Service Announcement - Tortoise Food Chunks
I was reminded today that not everyone knows that "hard" foods like opuntia, cucumber, carrots, or this time of year, pumpkin should not be cut up and fed in chunks. Chunks of these types of food will be swallowed whole by tortoises and can cause them to choke to death. It doesn't happen every...
Good info in your post other than that. I just wanted to point these things out for you and other people reading.
View attachment 363693
Have you tried moistened Mazuri (I have to literally moisten them, smoosh them together and then serve them)? Yes, my torties are spoiled
