Hatchling Care

So your tortoise eggs have hatched and you’ve become the proud grandparent of half a dozen perfect miniatures.  You crack open a bottle of champers, and perhaps even allow yourself a puff on a fat King Edward whilst inviting the next door neighbours around  to share the moment, well, maybe not. But the arrival of hatchling tortoises never fails to bring joy to even the most experienced keepers amongst us.

But what now?
How can you ensure you provide them with the very best start in life? After all, you’ve created some dependants which should still be around far long after you’ve departed this World.

Les White talks frankly about the basic care of youngsters, based upon four decades of experience.

Water - The Vital First Steps:

On first arrival it is vitally important to ensure your babies are well hydrated. Water for the first couple of days after hatching is considerably more important than food at this stage. Hatchlings will still be nourishing themselves on the glycogen released from their yolk sacs, so they may even be reluctant to feed for a day or two anyway, this is perfectly normal.
However in every single case, without exception, they will readily consume copious amounts of water immediately after hatching. This allows for maximum hydration and the flushing out of uric acid compounds and toxins created during the neonates’ yolk absorption.

In fact such is the importance of H2O to newly hatched tortoises that in the wild you will observe hatchlings breaking out of their egg shells and emerging from their subterranean nests during, or just after, rainfall. The relative rise in humidity within the nest triggering a hard-wired reaction for them to break free exactly when there will be the most likelihood of rain-formed puddles to drink from.

In captive incubation situations I have always observed the same reactions too; Eggs from different mothers, which were laid at completely separate times, hatching out at precisely the same moment as each other, at the point when extra water trays were added to boost the humidity within the incubator.
This little known ability of the neonates to effectively “decide” when to leave the egg is a great evolutionary tool, developed over millennia, used to vastly increase their chances of survival.
 Of course rainfall not only allows the babies to drink but it can also be the trigger for new vegetation growth too, in otherwise harsh scrubland, meaning the youngsters have a more readily available food source during the critical first few weeks.

So, in captive situations we need to artificially cater for their fluid intake too, mimicking their wild behaviours.
The best method by far is to place the newly hatched babies in a warm shallow pool of water at a depth to where the level just touches the underneath of their chins; paddling depth if you will!
Plant pot drip trays or shallow saucers usually suffice for this purpose.
The temperature of the water should approximate the bath water of a human baby, so you could actually do the same human baby bath water test by dipping your elbow or wrist in to the water.
Or, for the more OCD amongst us, a thermometer can be used as a tool to obtain an ideal temperature of between 30 to 40*c.
The babies should be allowed to sit in the water for five minutes at a time, and this bathing procedure should be repeated three times a day for the first few weeks.
After a month has elapsed the bathing can be cut down to once a day.

Babies which have a partial yolk sac still remaining after hatching should be placed back within the incubator, in a sterile Tupperware tub with no substrate, for a couple of days until the sac is either absorbed or it shrivels up and drops off.  This is to prevent any possible infections or complications associated with substrates sticking to, or being abrasive to, their “belly buttons”.
For siblings with fully-fused plastrons (no yolk sac evident) they can be removed from the incubator and be placed in their regular accommodation.

Feeding

Newly hatched babies can be offered food from day one, though don’t be at all surprised if they don’t eat for a couple of days or so. As I explained earlier they can still be “digesting” their yolk sac for the first few days, so their natural feeling of hunger may not kick in straight away.
Once they do start eating though, the sight of these perfect little miniatures tucking in to their food is one of the most rewarding parts of the hobby; well it certainly is for me personally anyway.

Food should mirror that of their adult counterparts’ diet in terms of choice; this basically consisting mainly of seasonal weeds and flowers, with the occasional helping from the greengrocers.
There are many publications and references to good balanced tortoise diets available both online and in book stores, so I won’t go into specific detail here, however, where possible, offer weeds and flowers over and above shop-bought items. There is far more nutritional value in a dandelion for example than there is in a lettuce leaf.

With hatchlings and really young juveniles cutting larger leaves into much smaller biteable chunks and offering generally small-leaved foods like clover for example seems to be preferred over large leaves.

Calcium and vitamin supplements should be lightly dusted on each feed, and the addition of crunched-up pieces of bite-size cuttlefish bone made available in their enclosures at all times.

Steady, slow growth is far healthier for a developing tortoise than rapid growth.
Accelerated growth rates in chelonia can cause such problems as excessive keratin layers and pyramiding of the carapace scutes, , excess urea production, kidney problems and so forth.  Therefore excessive feeding should be completely discouraged and instead regular adjustment of the animals’ intake should be taken in order to achieve slow growth.
Aim for no more than a gain of 1 inch of the length of the carapace in each year.

Generally speaking I always fed newly hatched tortoises twice a day as much as they could consume within a 5 minute window of opportunity, removing any excess food after the time had elapsed.
Once the youngsters had reached 6 months old I switched the feeding to just once per day, 4 or 5 times a week. The other 2 or 3 days were left intentionally void of food stuffs.
On this regime I have successfully grown hundreds of hatchlings on to full maturity with perfect shell and bone formation.  

Accomodatory requirements:

There are very many misconceptions and old wives’ tales concerning the husbandry of baby tortoises, with their accommodation being no exception.
Within my forty years of being involved in keeping chelonia (God that makes me sound old) I’ve heard everything from “babies shouldn’t be allowed outside” through to “tortoises get stressed by glass” and every possible strange scenario in between!

The truth however is not as complicated as some would have us believe.

The main criteria of a baby tortoise’s housing needs, in order for it to fully thrive, can be easily met by following these few golden rules;

·         A tortoise needs both indoor and outdoor accommodation

·         When outdoors it needs to be in a sunny location and to be protected from predators

·         When indoors it needs heat, light and UVB, but also excellent air flow.

·         When either indoors or outdoors it needs a hide to retreat from the heat / sun / rain, etc.

·         When either indoors or outdoors in needs access to water

·         When either indoors or outdoors it needs a suitable substrate to allow for burying and creating microclimates.

There, that’s it; there’s nothing mysterious, difficult, impractical, unachievable, or otherwise, about that, is there?
The fact of the matter is we should simply treat babies almost identically to the same way as we treat our adult charges.
However, I did say “almost”, as there are a couple of small, but very important, tweaks to a baby’s housing requirements which could mean the ultimate difference between survival or cessation.

Nowadays there are very practical and beautiful Tortoise Homes commercially available to purchase at relatively little expense, which are packed full of beneficial tortoise friendly features. The Vividarium Tortoise Home is one fantastic example;

So, starting with outdoor accommodation first.

Like I’ve already mentioned a baby tortoise does need an outdoor home, and furthermore it needs as much outdoor exposure as is physically possible within the confines of our country’s climatory boundaries, for as you are most probably aware, tortoises rely on the sun’s radiation for both thermal properties and vitamin D3 synthesis, without either of which a tortoise would perish.
Thus its imperative to locate a baby tortoise’s outdoor accommodation in a sunny spot, preferably facing south and preferably on a slight incline to reduce shadows and make the most of the sun rays at any time of the day.  A slope also offers better drainage....
Tortoises don’t thrive on soggy ground.

The outdoor pen should be made escape proof by having solid sides which are sunk into the ground by at least 6 inches. For known burrowing species such as Horsfield tortoises further precautions of laying plastic-coated chicken mesh underneath the ground and securing this to the sides of the pen is also advisable, unless you want to spend half of the summer knocking on your neighbour’s door to ask if you can search around their garden for a missing pet!

Opportunists such as cats, birds, foxes, etc would soon make a meal out of a hatchling or juvenile tortoise, so precautions need to be taken to ensure no predation takes place. A lockable hinged mesh lid covering the entirety of the pen is fairly straightforward, easy to build and absolutely essential.

Within the enclosure you can create an interesting and aesthetically pleasing landscape for your tiny pets to wander and explore, through the use of various materials and substrates such as soil, gravel, stones and grass along with growing wild food items within too, such as dandelions and clover.

However, with regards to hatchling and juvenile landscaping; one of the “tweaks” I earlier brushed upon which could mean the difference between life and death concerns their climbing behaviour.
Try to create the landscape without any obstacles on which a baby tortoise could climb, as hatchlings and juveniles are much more prone to falling on their backs and not being able to correct themselves, than their adult counterparts, thus death from heat exposure is a real risk.

The enclosure should however feature a weatherproof hide as this is an essential piece of kit to allow the animals’ an escape and a retreat from the elements.  Miniature open-sided greenhouses can aid in a tortoise’s thermoregulation and should be considered as useful additions too.
A sunken, very shallow, plant pot drip tray for H2O purposes completes the list of essentials.

Now, the aforementioned advice I presume seems rather straightforward to most, and apart from me having mentioned the recommendation of creating a non-climbing landscape along with the introduction of a predator proof lid, both of which could mean the difference between survival or death, you’d be forgiven to think that hatchling accommodation is otherwise the same as an adults’.  
And in most parts it is. However one “tweak” which I would seriously recommend to anybody when designing baby tortoise enclosures focuses on the actual shape of the perimeter walls.....

For decades the average hobbyist, myself included, typically built square or rectangular wooden pens to keep our youngsters contained in, and if this still works for you today, thats fine.  However if you did embark on a new project to alter the shape of your pen you may surprised by the results.....
Now, if you think I’m starting to ramble on about something completely irrelevant here, please bear with me as it will eventually make sense!!!
When I was a young lad I remember my late father taking me to see the Humber bridge after it had just been built, and at that time it boasted to be the World’s largest ever suspension bridge. It was certainly an impressive sight, and still is, not that I’m really into architecture or anything, but the length of it nevertheless can’t fail to impress.
Anyway there were a couple of men dressed in overalls, hanging in a cherry-picker type contraption, with long paint rollers in their grasp busily painting the structure.
My dad said to me that these guys had been tasked with a never ending perpetual job; for you see that by the time they had reached the other side it would be time to start re-painting at the beginning again, such is the length of the structure and the time taken to finish one coat.
I was amazed by the fact that their job was literally never ending – ever!
Anyway twenty or so years ago when my tortoise-hobby turned into a profession and my company were responsible for producing hatchling numbers upwards of 1000 per annum, I one day found myself remembering the conversation I’d had with my dad all those years ago;
For I had over one hundred rectangular pens, laid out side by side in a huge straight line, with each pen containing 8 very lively hatchlings.
My staff and I took turns every single minute and hour of daylight, every single day, to be on “flipping duty”.  When I say “flipping” I’m not cursing, I mean it in the very literal sense.
You see for some reason hatchlings and juveniles, (not so much with adults) always seem to head straight to the corners of a rectangular pen and attempt to shimmy up the 90 degree sides with the usual inevitable consequences of them ending up upside down on their backs in the midday sun.

Consequently, in order to combat any mortality one of us had to start with pen number 1, re-flipping the babies back on to their feet, then move on to pen number 2, 3, 4, until we reached the last pen. Then in typical Humber Bridge fashion we started back at pen number 1 again and repeated the process.

This, as you can imagine was hugely time consuming, but absolutely critical in avoiding heat-related deaths. It did however give me time to think;
I employed the services of a local fibreglass agent to make me a prototype pen which was oval in shape and had glass-like smooth sides.
I dug the pen into the ground, landscaped it and predator protected it as normal.
The affect was instant and indeed very welcomed.  It cut down the tortoise-tumbles by as much as 75%.
I therefore changed every single pen to the new oval design, and from that day on have never kept a young tortoise in a pen with right angles ever since.

And so my tip to anybody wanting to create a set-up for a young tortoise is to use ovals or circles, especially if you, like most people, have a normal day to day life to attend to and can’t sit guard over your babies throughout the day. This simple “tweak” could be the difference between life or death for your pet, especially on sunny days, or when heat lamps are used, as young tortoises don’t have a large body mass and so they gain and lose heat rapidly, meaning up-ended babies are at risk of literally being “cooked” in a relatively very short period of time.

As a rough rule of thumb, I would suggest that baby tortoises should be taken outdoors if the weather is sufficient enough for us to venture outside wearing just a shirt. But they should be brought in to their indoor enclosure if we have to wear woolly jumpers or raincoats.
I realise that in the UK that could effectively mean us carrying our charges back and forth ten times within the very same day, but the advice is to be taken as rough guide, and not literally. Its absolutely fine if you’ve popped out to the shops and it suddenly starts raining, it doesn’t mean you have to come rushing back home to re-house the tortoise.  Afterall they do experience cold, wet and cloudy days in the wild too. 

Indoor housing

My main tip about using ovals and circles for outdoor pens also holds true for all indoor set-ups too.
There are now, commercially available, indoor tortoise tables which are oval in design, featuring built in hides and having structures in place to suspend lighting from, so a hobbyist shouldn’t have too many problems in acquiring such vivaria if a home-build DIY project isn’t favourable to them.

The main requirements for an indoor set up are that the enclosures, preferably oval or round in shape, should have relatively low sides and a completely open top.  This is to allow for maximum ventilation, heat dissipation, and air flow.

Tortoises should never be housed in completely enclosed vivaria, or in vivaria with high sides.
 The ventilation isn’t sufficient in such designs and furthermore any heat created within, from basking lamps and such, is fairly evenly displaced, which means a tortoise can’t properly thermoregulate by choosing to step in and out of the heat as it requires.
It is purely for this reason and this reason alone that fish tanks and wooden vivaria – typically with enclosed lids and glass sliding doors, should never be used.
It is however a very common misconception that tortoises shouldn’t be kept in this sort of accommodation because they get stressed by the see-through nature of glass, as was once thought.
In my four decades of experience of keeping captive chelonia I’ve never witnessed any behaviour, detrimental or otherwise, associated with non-opaque surfaces.
Tortoises, turtles and terrapins are incredibly intelligent animals given their relative small size and their ability to recognise the difference between clear open space and solid structures, regardless of whether the structure is transparent or opaque, is at least akin to any other creature on this planet. And given the fact that they can actually smell obstacles they don’t even have to rely on eyesight to know whether a solid surface is in front of them, which is not something most of the animal kingdom can boast!
Strangely enough the misconception that a tortoise will try to walk through glass never seemed to be evenly applied to snakes, lizards and so on, and yet tortoises have equal or better mental capacity than most reptiles.
I can only conclude that this theory was born out of a poorly written text at some point which was most probably trying to emphasise the point that if a tortoise can see through a non-solid structure (wire fencing for example) it will try to get through it. That is of course a totally different scenario, and one which by comparison is completely accurate. A tortoise which can “smell” freedom (not so much “see” freedom) will often make a bee line to explore, consequently this lead to lots of wire-penned tortoises kept as pets in the 1970’s spending most of their sorry lives with their heads and forelimbs stuck through the gaps of the wire fence. Solid structures, transparent or otherwise, obviously do not create these stresses.
 In short; tortoises do not get stressed when kept behind glass.

Indoor lighting & heating

Tortoises, turtles and terrapins are all cold-blooded reptiles which consequently rely on external heat to warm their bodies. In the wild chelonia maintain their body temperatures very efficiently thanks to the sun’s thermal rays.  Unfortunately the UK doesn’t enjoy the same intensity of sunshine received by their native geographical locations and thus consequently we need to provide our captive friends with a little extra sunshine, albeit artificial, within their indoor set-ups.

The best way to “warm a tortoise” is by mimicking the wild environment. This effectively means creating an artificial sun by the use of overhead lights, with wattage relative to the size of the enclosure, and the distance between the bulb and the tortoise, to allow a warm spot of approximately 35*c  directly underneath. 

A simple reflective spot light can be used for a very good source of overhead heat and light at very little cost, though additional UVB emitting lamps would also have to be utilised for a tortoise’s vitamin D3 synthesis too.
Or you could opt for a combined heat light / UVB bulb, which are commonplace within the reptile industry these days. Although a little more expensive than an ordinary bulb they have the advantage of not having to rely on separate heat and UVB lamps if space is an issue. They also ensure that a tortoise is definitely being exposed to UVB at the same time as it basks as it would identically in the wild.
I have used combined heat/UVB bulbs with all of my hatchlings with 100% success, and these would be my recommendation to anybody keeping hatchlings and juveniles indoors.
It must be stated though that because of the very small mass of hatchlings and juveniles they can dehydrate very quickly. Therefore when any type of lamp is used you must ensure that you make certain of three critical daily husbandry practices;
1. Always provide a shallow water dish within the enclosure.
2. Always bathe your young tortoises every single day in a shallow tub of warm water.
3. Always provide a hide area with high humidity levels. This can be achieved by regularly spraying with a plant sprayer, or much more effectively by attaching a damp sponge on to one of the hide’s walls. The enormous amount of “surface area” contained within a sponge will allow slow evaporation to occur, raising the relative humidity within the space of the hide over a much longer timescale.

 Contrary again to an extremely common misconception that any overhead lamps must be placed at just one end of any indoor enclosure, this practice is for the most part irrelevant providing the enclosure is open-topped to allow for maximum heat dissipation, and large enough for the tortoise to walk out of the immediate hot-spot when it wants to.  Therefore for 99% of tortoise tables and open enclosures in general, the lamps could be at the end, at a side, in the middle, etc.
The phenomena of having lamps situated at one end only was, and still is, only really justified in small fully enclosed (not open topped) vivaria whereby heat created from the lamps would be displaced fairly evenly within the environment, meaning a tortoise couldn’t “choose” to heat up and cool down by effectively walking in and out of a localised heat source.
With any open enclosure the “unwanted waste heat” generated simply escapes upwards and out of the enclosure , allowing only the “wanted heat” (the heat directly underneath the lamp) to remain constant and localised. So providing a tortoise can walk around the heat to avoid it, if it chooses, the positioning of the lamp in open-topped vivaria is actually irrelevant.

Heat Mats - Should definitely be avoided

As already discussed tortoises in their wild environment heat their bodies by basking underneath the overhead sun, and in captivity we should replicate this behaviour with overhead lamps.
Despite the fact a wild tortoise can gain some thermal transfer from sitting on a warm substrate or rock, this method is definitely only secondary to having the sun as an overhead basking source, and attempts to replicate this in captivity through heat mats placed underneath the substrate and /or the use of “electric reptile rocks” should be entirely avoided.
Generally speaking all chelonia, whether in their natural environment or in captivity, bury down into the substrate when they no longer want to bask, for example when they are sufficiently warm already, or they want to rest or sleep.  It is therefore completely unnatural for a tortoise to start digging into the substrate only to find itself actually gaining heat as it does so, because of under-substrate heating. This phenomenon will stress a tortoise and play havoc with its thermoregulation activities. Furthermore there is also evidence to suggest imbalances of gut bacteria and parasite proliferation associated with “plastron-heating”.
The only time heat mats for tortoises should ever be used is when they are positioned vertically and attached to an enclosure’s wall, effectively creating a mini radiator, purely for background heat in times of severe cold weather.

Some other common myths associated with rearing young tortoises

·         They need oil rubbing on their shells;

Completely untrue and completely counter-productive to the animal’s well being.
A tortoise’s carapace has millions of microscopic pores allowing radiant heat transfer to occur. If you block these pores with oil you will be effectively hampering its ability to bask.
Furthermore oil will trap bacteria underneath it which can lead to shell rot.

·         You shouldn’t hibernate Mediterranean tortoises until they are adults

Wrong.  Wild Mediterranean tortoises hibernate from their very first winter.
Successful hibernation techniques in captive tortoises helps to reduce accelerated growth rates, re-charges their batteries so to speak, and gives their digestive and renal systems a break. Failure to allow a tortoise to hibernate usually leads to long-term complications such as renal problems through kidney and bladder stone formation, and shell and bone formation problems associated with unnatural growth.

·         You can feed them cat and dog food

You could..... but only if you want to drastically reduce their lifespan. Foodstuffs containing high amounts of protein such as meat products, peas, beans, etc , should be entirely avoided.
High protein equates to extra workload on the animals’ digestive and renal system, excess uric acid production, and inevitable bladder and kidney stone formation.

·         They need to be kept in pairs for company.

Nope.  Although its true to say that young tortoises interact with each other, usually without problems or incidents, they don’t actually require each others’ company and are quite as happy living on their own.  Besides, unless you know for an absolute certainty that your couple of youngsters are female, you will end up having to separate them at a later stage anyway as adult males don’t mix with other males or females in a 1 to 1 ratio.

·         You can sex a baby tortoise by looking at its carapace, its plastron, its tail, or its coloration.

None of the above is actually true. It is absolutely impossible to sex a tortoise until it starts going through adolescence which is usually around 4 years of age. Before this stage of their life there is no way of knowing.  And colouration is never an indicator regardless of age.