My tortoise is about a year and a half old now. Can you tell if it is female or male?

OkAdiza

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Hello, it looks too young to tell. What type of tortoise is it? Is it a Russian?
 
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OkAdiza

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Looks like a hermanns. With that plastron and the nails.
Hey there,
The Western Hermann’s will have more of two distinct black strips on either side, Eastern more separated. This whole black plastron is more characteristic of a Russian I think, but since there wasn’t a picture of the carapace, I wasn’t sure.
 

TaylorTortoise

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Hey there,
The Western Hermann’s will have more of two distinct black strips on either side, Eastern more separated. This whole black plastron is more characteristic of a Russian I think, but since there wasn’t a picture of the carapace, I wasn’t sure.
I guess we shall find out
 

OkAdiza

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@Julian32122 hopefully some others with more experience than me may chime in, but your Russian looks too young to tell gender. It looks like it might be male to me, but I think it’s too young.
 

Yvonne G

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Rule of thumb for testudos is - slot shaped cloaca = male, star or asterisk shape = female. This one looks slot shaped?????
 

biochemnerd808

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So Russian tortoises sometimes unveil themselves as male as young as a year (by flashing their boy bits during a soak) but in general they all look female at this size... Until some don't. What we mean by this is, they hatch looking androgenous or all female. Then one day the males sprout a giant long male tail.
If a Russian tortoise still looks female at 450g weight, she is most likely actually a female.

Here is an article I wrote a while back that has photos of females and males and how to tell: https://www.tortoiseforum.org/threa...sex-of-your-russian-tortoise-with-pics.87181/
 
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