Need Marginated Advice, Please

[Shelbie]

Hi tglazie
I was wondering if you could give me some advice on my 2year old marginated tortoise? I have read a lot about humidity and how much it should need, but I find a lot of the info contradictory so I’m still unsure. Tom pointed me in your direction. I’m just looking to do the best possible for my Sheldon. I would be grateful for your input.

 

[tglazie]

Hi Shelbie,

Pleasure to meet you. Yes, I've been keeping marginated tortoises for several decades, and I produce a bunch of hatchlings every year, so I like to think I know what I'm doing, though I spent a great deal of time not knowing what I was doing when it came to keeping tortoises. Anywho, to get right to it, concerning humidity, I've found maintaining a proper level of humidity for growing marginated tortoises is vital to their well being. Living in South Texas, I am blessed with warm summers, high humidity during the spring, summer and fall, and warm rain showers, which the tortoises absolutely crave, night or shine. When I first started keeping marginated tortoises, I was always perplexed as to why it was they would leave their shelters at night during torrential rain storms. During those early years, I thought of wetness and rainy weather as a harbinger of doom. It wasn't until I gained more experience and learned more natural history concerning margies that I learned a warm rain is among their favorite things.

To be specific, allowing midday humidity to not fall below sixty or sixty five percent is critical. And night time humidity in the eighties is absolutely essential. Now, the way I acheive this is through humidifying my reptile room, which is always at 80-85 F during the night, and between 85-90 F during the day at all times. To maintain humidity, I keep a three hundred gallon tank with a homemade aeration filter that houses some red bellied sideneck turtles.

So you're not going to do this for your one tortoise, obviously, but I've found the best way to maintain humidity with a tortoise kept in a common living area (such as a bedroom or parlor) is to create a closed chamber. Tom and others who are pioneers of this technique can clue you in on the best ways to go about this, and you can find all manner of posts concerning this in the Enclosures section of the forum, but suffice it to say, it basically involves enclosing your tortoise's environment, lights, soil, hide and all, beneath a greenhouse type structure, which can be made cheaply from some basic hardware store supplies and a clear vinyl cover. This allows more precise humidity control and, an added benefit, temperature control.

As you live in Northern England, I would imagine that you must sustain, more often than not, some sub-optimal temperatures. Believe it or not, here in South Texas, we deal with the occasional freeze as well. When this happens, the air dries out. Local humidity can easily drop into the 30% range, and tortoises generally find this rather unpleasant. This can lead to pyramiding, dry eyes and skin, and any number of other undesirable effects that marginateds will certainly survive, but they won't necessarily be the better for it. Your best way to counteract this is to provide a closed environment where you can control the variables.

Lots of things go into controlling these variables. The first you should consider is thermostatic control of the heat source. How hot does your heat source make the area directly beneath it? How warm is the opposite end of the enclosure? You should be aiming for 88-95 F on the hot side, 78-85 on the cool end. This is most easily achieved with a more sizeable enclosure, obviously. Now, a lot of folks say that margies can drop down to lower temperatures, and this is definitely true. My biggest boy Big Gino spends nights outdoors in an insulated shelter when the temperatures drop into the forties, and when the sun comes out in the morning and the temp climbs back into the sixties, he's out in the field grazing like it was the middle of June. But Big Gino is an adult, a strong, durable adult male who can handle himself. Growing babies, no matter the species, are dumb and helpless. True, baby tortoises aren't as dumb and helpless as your average teenager, but they are far more vulnerable than adults, and must therefore be treated as special in order to survive. I've seen plenty of baby tortoises perish under my care when I was a bigger idiot than I am today, when I believed nonsense and lies from keepers urging me to treat babies like adults.

The second variable you should consider is soil moisture. I'm always of the view that the surface of the soil should be dry, but beneath the surface, it should be moist. It doesn't need to be water logged, though it may appear so whey you rehydrate the soil by dumping water into it. That's the other thing. So many people I know spray their tortoises, and I'm not against spraying. By all means, spray away if you so desire it. But I pour water into my tortoise's substrate. To give an idea, I water my radiated tortoises in a bus tub. Now, I bathe them twice per day, once in the morning, once in the evening, and during one of those bathing sessions that week, one will not have any feces or urine voided into it. So, I will take that soak water, and dump it straight into the substrate of their Christmas tree container indoor enclosure. I do this three or four times a month. Some months, when the ambient humidity is high, this is all the water I need to pour into it. During the dry months, I usually have to pour in more. It's all a matter of feel for me, honestly, but just know that if your substrate is dry and producing dust, you need to pour some water into it. For those familiar with gardening, which you should be as a tortoise keeper, I feel, treat the tortoise's substrate like you would twenty four inch ghost pepper plant in an 18 inch clay pot. If that soil isn't kept moist, that plant's leaves are going to wilt, and it won't make the fire breathing peppers you so desperately crave, and then where would you be?

The last thing you should control is how often you water your tortoise. Now, to me, it is critical that any tortoise below the age of five years old and below the carapace length of five inches be bathed twice per day. Drinking regularly is a habit that is learned, and I know this because my stubborn old Greek tortoise whom I've kept since I was a kid doesn't ever drink unless I spray the ground in his enclosure and he can lap up the mud. Tortoises learn from an early age what an acceptable water source is, and that is why it is critical to allow them as many opportunities to drink as you can afford, and for me, that means soaking babies twice per day. This will also make sure that they can withstand whatever other shortcomings your care is bound to occasionally suffer, which truly, there's no shame in it. We're human beings, and we sometimes forget to do what we've committed to doing. A couple weeks back, I put my radiated torts into a bath, got distracted by a phone call, and left the damned house without putting them outdoors for the morning. When I got back for lunch, there they were, sitting in a pool of their own mess, cross that their thoughtless human had pulled a Gilbert Grape on them. It was a stupid mistake, and I'm sad to say I've made far worse than that.

Anywho, I hope this addresses some of your concerns regarding humidity. Just remember, margies hail from a peninsula, one that receives a good amount of rain. Their tolerance for wetter conditions is precisely why I chose to work with them as a species, given the unique conditions of my own climate. The conditions of your climate, of course, will necessitate very different considerations, some of which I've outlined here, many of which you will either have to discover on your own or through the experiences of other Brits. I know that there is a great deal of conflicting information out there, but I assure you that you've arrived in the right place, and that the info you will find here is the closest thing to proper you will find anywhere. Now this isn't to say that you won't still find some conflicting information. Among members of the forum, there are any number of controversial topics that you will stumble upon when browsing threads. As a new person, I would simply advise not to get caught up in those arguments. Some of our members can be a little crabby when they feel they're right, as can anyone in an argument, if my family's history is of any indication. So many of my biggest knock down, drag out arguments occurred between my father and I concerning tortoise care. Even though he passed away back in 2011, I still look at all I accomplished since then, look to the sky, and gloat a little. And anytime I visit his grave, that's when I really gloat. "Hey dad, remember that time you thought that I was crazy for soaking little Marge every day? Yeah, well she laid another clutch of seven eggs, and all of them just hatched this past July 3rd. And here's a picture of her yearlings from last year before I sold them. Another smooth bunch of well grown, beautiful babies. So suck an egg, Pops." Just kidding about that last part. I never told my old man to suck an egg lest I was looking for discipline, and I was never actually looking for discipline, just stupid enough to find it on occasion.

But rambling aside, speak to any of us breeders on the forum, and you will find a wealth of information from a wide range of people from a wide range of climates. All of us have learned things the hard way, and it is our hope that fewer of us must learn this way in the future.

T.G.

 

[Tom]

Hi Shelbie,

Pleasure to meet you. Yes, I've been keeping marginated tortoises for several decades, and I produce a bunch of hatchlings every year, so I like to think I know what I'm doing, though I spent a great deal of time not knowing what I was doing when it came to keeping tortoises. Anywho, to get right to it, concerning humidity, I've found maintaining a proper level of humidity for growing marginated tortoises is vital to their well being. Living in South Texas, I am blessed with warm summers, high humidity during the spring, summer and fall, and warm rain showers, which the tortoises absolutely crave, night or shine. When I first started keeping marginated tortoises, I was always perplexed as to why it was they would leave their shelters at night during torrential rain storms. During those early years, I thought of wetness and rainy weather as a harbinger of doom. It wasn't until I gained more experience and learned more natural history concerning margies that I learned a warm rain is among their favorite things.

To be specific, allowing midday humidity to not fall below sixty or sixty five percent is critical. And night time humidity in the eighties is absolutely essential. Now, the way I acheive this is through humidifying my reptile room, which is always at 80-85 F during the night, and between 85-90 F during the day at all times. To maintain humidity, I keep a three hundred gallon tank with a homemade aeration filter that houses some red bellied sideneck turtles.

So you're not going to do this for your one tortoise, obviously, but I've found the best way to maintain humidity with a tortoise kept in a common living area (such as a bedroom or parlor) is to create a closed chamber. Tom and others who are pioneers of this technique can clue you in on the best ways to go about this, and you can find all manner of posts concerning this in the Enclosures section of the forum, but suffice it to say, it basically involves enclosing your tortoise's environment, lights, soil, hide and all, beneath a greenhouse type structure, which can be made cheaply from some basic hardware store supplies and a clear vinyl cover. This allows more precise humidity control and, an added benefit, temperature control.

As you live in Northern England, I would imagine that you must sustain, more often than not, some sub-optimal temperatures. Believe it or not, here in South Texas, we deal with the occasional freeze as well. When this happens, the air dries out. Local humidity can easily drop into the 30% range, and tortoises generally find this rather unpleasant. This can lead to pyramiding, dry eyes and skin, and any number of other undesirable effects that marginateds will certainly survive, but they won't necessarily be the better for it. Your best way to counteract this is to provide a closed environment where you can control the variables.

Lots of things go into controlling these variables. The first you should consider is thermostatic control of the heat source. How hot does your heat source make the area directly beneath it? How warm is the opposite end of the enclosure? You should be aiming for 88-95 F on the hot side, 78-85 on the cool end. This is most easily achieved with a more sizeable enclosure, obviously. Now, a lot of folks say that margies can drop down to lower temperatures, and this is definitely true. My biggest boy Big Gino spends nights outdoors in an insulated shelter when the temperatures drop into the forties, and when the sun comes out in the morning and the temp climbs back into the sixties, he's out in the field grazing like it was the middle of June. But Big Gino is an adult, a strong, durable adult male who can handle himself. Growing babies, no matter the species, are dumb and helpless. True, baby tortoises aren't as dumb and helpless as your average teenager, but they are far more vulnerable than adults, and must therefore be treated as special in order to survive. I've seen plenty of baby tortoises perish under my care when I was a bigger idiot than I am today, when I believed nonsense and lies from keepers urging me to treat babies like adults.

The second variable you should consider is soil moisture. I'm always of the view that the surface of the soil should be dry, but beneath the surface, it should be moist. It doesn't need to be water logged, though it may appear so whey you rehydrate the soil by dumping water into it. That's the other thing. So many people I know spray their tortoises, and I'm not against spraying. By all means, spray away if you so desire it. But I pour water into my tortoise's substrate. To give an idea, I water my radiated tortoises in a bus tub. Now, I bathe them twice per day, once in the morning, once in the evening, and during one of those bathing sessions that week, one will not have any feces or urine voided into it. So, I will take that soak water, and dump it straight into the substrate of their Christmas tree container indoor enclosure. I do this three or four times a month. Some months, when the ambient humidity is high, this is all the water I need to pour into it. During the dry months, I usually have to pour in more. It's all a matter of feel for me, honestly, but just know that if your substrate is dry and producing dust, you need to pour some water into it. For those familiar with gardening, which you should be as a tortoise keeper, I feel, treat the tortoise's substrate like you would twenty four inch ghost pepper plant in an 18 inch clay pot. If that soil isn't kept moist, that plant's leaves are going to wilt, and it won't make the fire breathing peppers you so desperately crave, and then where would you be?

The last thing you should control is how often you water your tortoise. Now, to me, it is critical that any tortoise below the age of five years old and below the carapace length of five inches be bathed twice per day. Drinking regularly is a habit that is learned, and I know this because my stubborn old Greek tortoise whom I've kept since I was a kid doesn't ever drink unless I spray the ground in his enclosure and he can lap up the mud. Tortoises learn from an early age what an acceptable water source is, and that is why it is critical to allow them as many opportunities to drink as you can afford, and for me, that means soaking babies twice per day. This will also make sure that they can withstand whatever other shortcomings your care is bound to occasionally suffer, which truly, there's no shame in it. We're human beings, and we sometimes forget to do what we've committed to doing. A couple weeks back, I put my radiated torts into a bath, got distracted by a phone call, and left the damned house without putting them outdoors for the morning. When I got back for lunch, there they were, sitting in a pool of their own mess, cross that their thoughtless human had pulled a Gilbert Grape on them. It was a stupid mistake, and I'm sad to say I've made far worse than that.

Anywho, I hope this addresses some of your concerns regarding humidity. Just remember, margies hail from a peninsula, one that receives a good amount of rain. Their tolerance for wetter conditions is precisely why I chose to work with them as a species, given the unique conditions of my own climate. The conditions of your climate, of course, will necessitate very different considerations, some of which I've outlined here, many of which you will either have to discover on your own or through the experiences of other Brits. I know that there is a great deal of conflicting information out there, but I assure you that you've arrived in the right place, and that the info you will find here is the closest thing to proper you will find anywhere. Now this isn't to say that you won't still find some conflicting information. Among members of the forum, there are any number of controversial topics that you will stumble upon when browsing threads. As a new person, I would simply advise not to get caught up in those arguments. Some of our members can be a little crabby when they feel they're right, as can anyone in an argument, if my family's history is of any indication. So many of my biggest knock down, drag out arguments occurred between my father and I concerning tortoise care. Even though he passed away back in 2011, I still look at all I accomplished since then, look to the sky, and gloat a little. And anytime I visit his grave, that's when I really gloat. "Hey dad, remember that time you thought that I was crazy for soaking little Marge every day? Yeah, well she laid another clutch of seven eggs, and all of them just hatched this past July 3rd. And here's a picture of her yearlings from last year before I sold them. Another smooth bunch of well grown, beautiful babies. So suck an egg, Pops." Just kidding about that last part. I never told my old man to suck an egg lest I was looking for discipline, and I was never actually looking for discipline, just stupid enough to find it on occasion.

But rambling aside, speak to any of us breeders on the forum, and you will find a wealth of information from a wide range of people from a wide range of climates. All of us have learned things the hard way, and it is our hope that fewer of us must learn this way in the future.

T.G.

So much wisdom here! So well worded and entertaining to read too. I feel the same way about all those stupid mistakes I made in the past and that's why I try so hard to help other people NOT make those same mistakes. Thank you for sharing all this valuable info.

And, ghost peppers… mmmmmmmmm….. Not too many people are up for that kind of heat T.G. I have got to stop by and shake your hand next time I come through San Antonio. Ghost pepper cheese burgers. Ghost pepper breakfast burritos. Ghost pepper pizza... I pass through there once or twice a year going to New Orleans for work.

 

[Shelbie]

Thank you so much TG for taking the time to post such a wealth of information, I honestly thought I had done enough research before purchasing my tortoise, but it was nothing to the advice and information on here. My tortoise seems to be doing well and enjoying the conservatory, although I’m mindful of temps, I am definitely going to start adding water into his substrate as I feel the air is too dry, and that was my concern. Thank you so much[emoji106][emoji3]

 

[tglazie]

No problem, Shelbie. Glad I could be of some help.

Sure thing, Tom. Let me know when you drive through. And yes, I do enjoy ghost peppers, probably a little too much. I grow jalapenos and habaneros in the garden, and I like the flavor of those alright, but you really have to use a lot of them to get the sort of heat I can appreciate. Now, ghosts are just right. They inflict that good bit of pain at the start, and then it gets slowly washed away by endorphins. Plus their flavor profile is quite nice. I also grow Trinidad scorpion peppers, and if we're talking hot, then we're talking scorpion peppers. I can generally take those when they're green, before they've matured into Satan's nail clippings, but this time of year, when they turn bright crimson, oh goodness.

T.G.