Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I re-emphasize that captive tortoises should be kept reasonably
warm and dry at night. Suggesting that someone allow their hatchling
tort to drop to 40 degrees at night without batting an eye, is inviting
illness and death.
In a desert the air temps do drop rapidly at night to quite low
temps, but the earth is going to retain and radiate its heat.
Keeping an animal in an indoor enclosure that's only "heated" to
high temps by artificial means doesn't come close to duplicating
the radiating and reflective heat of the sun and true nighttime
radiant heat and air temp drop. Obviously the humidity is going
to be different also.

Is anybody successfully keeping sulcatas like this? Tortoisehead
your theories worry me that a newbie with a hatchling will actually
do this. I think you should add a qualifier to your posts on
whether you actually keep animals like you're announcing or just
stating your opinions.

I kept my sulcata hatchling at a night time temp of 78 and he
mad the choice to stay there at night having a 300 gallon enclosure
he could have easily moved to a cooler (room temp - 70-72) area.
I keep the house 75 days, 72 nights. When Teddy was a hatchling
we lived in a house that was old and not this one. Once he got
bigger - 10 lbs. he slept at room temp.

Again, people you can keep your pets any way that you want and
follow any advice you choose to.

I don't keep him warm "all of the time", he gets out in 40 - 50
degree weather also, as long as it is sunny. But he's also
a good size now, I wouldn't do it when he was small, he didn't
get out in under 65 degrees. Heck I've got pics. of him plowing
through snow, I'm not keeping him in an oven. I just think you
have to be careful with youngsters keeping them stable.
The youngsters in the wild may be exposed to exactly what you're
saying is the conditions there (though I disagree), but even
if they ARE, the success rate and survival rate for hatchlings is
not going to be acceptable here. Everybody wants every one
of their pets to live and I don't think any loss is an option.
These are pets that people love, I don't think it's worth the
rist of experimenting.

What do you suggest...ceramic heat of some kind, or the heat rope... or what?

Raising the thermostat in my house is not an option. I don't want to be facing divorce after only 4 months of marriage... LOL

What brands etc do you recommend for a ( /- a couple months) 1 year old Russian Tortoise in a 55 gallon rubbermaid set up? She's warm enough during the day, while the heat lamp and UV lamp are on, I would only need it to work at night.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "reasonably warm." Five different people may have five different ideas about the night time temperatures a tortoise can handle. I never said someone SHOULD keep their tortoises cool at night. I simply said that wild tortoises, even in Africa, experience temperatures at least down into the 40s, and it is only reasonable to expect they can do that in captivity as well.

Let's be honest here. How many people do you think are going to let their house drop down into the 40s or even lower at night anyway? I don't know anyone who does. I doesn't get that cold in my house, and I never use my central heating or any other type of heater for that matter. I maintain that unless you are an Eskimo living in an igloo in the north pole, it is virtually impossbile in this day and age of central heating and wall heaters and space heaters for your house to get cold enough to bother any kind of tortoise at night. Like I said though, this only holds true IF you allow them to warm up with sunlight or a heat lamp in the morning.

Yes, I have kept not only sulcatas, but leopard tortoises in my garage where it got plenty cold in the winter in small pens for several years until I sold them off because I wanted to only keep torts that hibernate. I had 4 leopards and 5 sulcatas and I grew them from hatchlings to about the size of dinner plates in this environment where the night time temps routinely reached the low 40s, and a few times I read the temps in the upper 30s during a few days in January. The tortoises suffered no ill effects whatsoever. They simply walked to the heat lamps in the morning and warmed themselves up. The garage warmed up to a higher temp than it was outside, to be sure, but at night it got down to roughly the outside temperature. Even if it was colder than they would have experienced in Northern Africa, which it wasn't, they would have done what is called adapting. As long as it happens slowly over time, all animals can adapt to temperatures you would normally not believe they could.