Reptile & Amphibian Forums

This is my first baby Russian (first baby Testudo for that matter). The amazing thing is that the eggs were laid on April 20. To put things into perspective, I keep spiders mainly and those eggs may take up to 8 months to hatch. This guy is awesome, a little war machine just like his parents. Cool...

congratulations!

all of my baby russians have hatched in 56-59 days.

best of luck and hope you get more babies.

np

np

asdf

Thanks. How humid do you keep your hatchlings? What substrate do you keep them on?

I assume you were asking me.

After the hatchlings completely emerge from the egg, I'll keep them in the incubator long enough for their shell to straighten out.

Then I keep them on a paper substrate for 3-5 days so that the scar from the yolk sac heals without being contaminated with substrate.

After that I keep them on about an inch of sand. I moisten the area of sand underneath the hide box. They burrow into that at night. There is a plastic jar lid filled with water.

A sand/soil mix is often recommended for a substrate, and I did use it for my first hatchling two years ago. But I found that it is hard to distinguish the feces from the soil, so now I just use straight playground sand. They show no signs of ingesting it. My adults live outdoors in a pen that has a lot of sand mixed in the topsoil.

I also soak them. For the first few days I soaked them daily. Then I switched over to an every other day or so schedule.

I've also been placing them outdoors in a Reptarium for a few hours a week.

Their diet has consisted of dandelion leaves, clover, various weeds, collards, turnip greens, and a little carrot and squash. I add plain calcium or calcium/d3 every meal or two (lightly).

Since hatching June 1 thru 5, they have gone from an average weight of 17.6 grams to 23.2 grams.

...hope you still have some patient after all these years... Spyderman!!!

nm