Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I just noticed my leopard tortoise looks like his eye is swollen-he is sleeping now and the one side of his head that I can see looks like his eye is pretty swollen-what is this a sign of?

Does he open his eye when he's awake?
Is there any discharge from the eye?

If he can open it and it's clear with no discharge he should be cool. Carrots are good for the eyes and can help out.

If his eye doesn't open, gently use a damp cotton tipped swap to moisten the eye just a bit so he can open it on his own. If it looks more serious than that (discharge, unable to open, loss of appetite) get him to a vet ASAP.

Yeah, carrots might help if he's having some eye issues, but you should probably try to find the cause. Swollen eyes is often an early warning sign of a vitamin A overdose (Keep in mind, dandelion greens are very high in vitamin A...and it's very easy for a small tort to overdose on it). It can also just be caused by debris in the eye.

A couple of weeks ago my hatchling russian started experiencing the same thing (One eye swollen, and he was having trouble opening it). I had read that dandelions were very high in Vitamin A, so I switched from almost all dandelions to about 1/3 dandelions, and the rest other high cal greens. I also put some antibiotic reptilian eye ointment on it (Can't remember the name of this stuff, but it's very expensive and hard to find...I think you need a prescription for it...that is if you don't know the right people). So I can't be certain whether it was vitamin A or debris in the eye. I also gently flushed the eye out with some water in an eye dropper (he hated that). It would have been nice to find out exactly what had caused it, but I was more focused on finding a solution at the time.

But those are all things you can try. Just don't stress the tort out too much.