General Hatchling Tortoise Care

This is intended as a basic set of husbandry techniques to follow to help insure the health of your new hatchling tortoise. The following techniques have been used with great success by our breeding facility for close to thirty years. We have refined our practices to help to insure the health and proper growth of our hatchling tortoises.

Purchasing your tortoise is one of the most important factors in its survival. We ask all of our potential customers to, please, research the animal you intend on purchasing BEFORE you buy it. Always have its enclosure set up and supplies on hand BEFORE you bring it home. Here is a basic checklist to follow when making the purchase to give you a heads up on its health. We know that you can’t always be present during the selection of your tortoise due to Internet sales, so make sure that you are buying from a reputable breeder. Ask questions on how they are kept and what their feeding regime is. Ask what type of lighting is being used and what, if any, dietary minerals are being supplemented and how often. Ask to see pictures of the exact tortoise that you will be receiving and when it was approximately hatched. In the event that you can purchase your tortoise in person, here are a few more things that you can look for. The shell of your new tortoise should be firm to hard. All newborns will have a certain amount of “flex” to their shells but they should not be overly soft. Make sure that the area around the yolk sac on the plastron is well healed and is not moist or has any discharge coming from it. The animal should have clear eyes and they should both open. Watch for gaping or discharge from the nose or mouth. This is a sign of an upper respiratory disease and all specimens in that container should be avoided. The most important thing is to ask questions. If the person you are buying from can’t answer your questions, I would think twice about the purchase. Although you take all these precautions, the fact remains that this is a living animal and could always have an underlying problem that is not easily seen. Please quarantine all new animals before introduction to your existing collection.

First in the rearing of your hatchling is the habitat in which it will be placed. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of a clean environment. All bedding materials should be changed on a weekly basis. The tank or enclosure should be disinfected with each cleaning and we recommend using a mixture of 2% Chlorhexidine and water at a rate of 2 oz. Chlorhexidine to 30 oz of water mixed in a spray bottle. The chlorhexadine can be purchased at any veterinarian clinic and at some internet supply houses. This mixture will disinfect the surfaces of the enclosure and most importantly will not harm your hatchling. This mixture may also be used as a disinfectant for cuts and abrasions that may occur on your tortoise through its life. Each tortoise species has specific needs for bedding and other environmental needs that will be covered in individual species descriptions.

All tortoises need a clean and fresh source of water available at all times. We use a vitamin and electrolyte supplement once weekly added to the water in either their drinking source or the soaking container. All baby tortoises are very susceptible to dehydration and should be soaked in a container at least twice weekly. This is a very good time to add calcium and vitamins to the water as most tortoises will drink as soon as they are placed in the water. The soaking will help with two major issues in a baby tortoises life. Those are hydration and the stimulation to defecate and clean out the digestive tract. The water should be at room temperature and no deeper than ¼ – ½ inches in depth. They should be allowed to soak for approximately one hour. Please keep a good watch over your babies to insure that they do not tip over and drown.

The calcium demand for a newly hatched tortoise is considerable and it is very easy for deficiencies to happen in the first few months of their lives. Babies that get “soft shell” a form of osteodystrophy, are almost always caused by too much dietary proteins and not enough dietary minerals. It is very important to balance this and to add a calcium and mineral supplement to their food source at least three times weekly to help prevent “soft shell” and other carapace deformities from occurring.

We never mix species in one enclosure. There are a couple of reasons for this. The first reason is that most species require different environmental needs. There is not a “one enclosure fits all” category. The second reason is disease control. Most species have built up immunities to certain diseases that are found in their environment. When a different species is introduced, you run the risk of spreading a disease that the other species does not have any immunity to and vise versa. We also recommend that all new animals be quarantined from your existing population for at least 30 days to ensure that they are healthy and will not spread any disease to your established animals.

Lighting and heat are of major importance to your hatchling. Proper levels of UVA/UVB are essential in the proper growth of your tortoise and metabolism of calcium. Remember that all tortoises are cold-blooded animals and need a heat source and a cooling area in their enclosure so that they can thermoregulate their body temperature. They need to be able to reach optimum temperature to increase their metabolism and to ensure the proper digestion of their food . We have found the power sun bulbs work very well for heating and some UVA/UVB output. We also use coil type UV bulbs to ensure that our hatchlings are receiving proper amounts of UVA/UVB light waves. The strip lights do not give off enough to make a significant difference. Again, different species have different optimum temperature ranges and different UVA/UVB ranges.

We hope that this will help you in the basic care of your new baby tortoise. These are all techniques that we use with great success . Good luck with your new pet.

Tags: Care Sheets, hatchling, tortoise