Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hello all, this is an update to an post a couple days ago that got no replies. Please respond if you have any ideas.

Last Wednesday went to feed the torts and found an EGG in the enclosure!!! I have a 7 year old, 24 pound female and an 8 pound, 3 year old male.

I have a large indoor enclosure with a plywood floor. About a year ago I added a 4'x4' dirt filled addition so that she could dig if needed. She is in it all the time, but it is very difficult to keep any moisture in it because it dries out so fast and when I water it the surface hardens like a giant dirt clod. I wanted to provide a place for her to lay eggs, but this does not seem to be working.

Anyway, my panic is that this is the first egg she has ever produced and she dropped it on the plywood floor of the enclosure, not in the dirt. I checked the dirt carefully and there are no other eggs that I can find. I would imagine that she needs to lay more.

I now have an incubator for the one egg so I am good there. The problem is that it has been 5 days now and she continues to exhibit behavior of wanting to lay more eggs. She has left large wet spots, drinks a lot, and is occasionally trying to dig with her back legs on the plywood floor. She goes in the dirt area all the time but does not dig there.

Things I have tried - I have walled off the dirt area so that she cannot leave that area. I have added a lot more sand to that area so that it is softer and not so compact. I added a heat lamp to that area as well. I know they can be very picky about where they lay eggs BUT IF THAT IS THE CASE WHY IS SHE TRYING TO DIG THROUGH THE PLYWOOD? Obviously the plywood floor is not "soft enough" or "the right moisture", but it might be the right temp.

Worst case scenario, if i bring her to the vet and she has eggs, what will they do about it? Can he get them out?

PLEASE HELP, Thanks,

Ben

Hello all - thought I would share an update.

It was suggested to me by someone here and my young son to try and put dirt where she is trying to dig, so I cut a hole in the plywood floor and sunk a large tub into the floor so the lip sits on the plywood and filled it with dirt. She came over, snifffed around a long time, walked nearby and tried to dig up the plywood. I moved her over to it again, she did the same thing. The difference now was that she did not even stop digging when I came around - she really wanted to dig. Then I walled off the area she was digging so that she could not go there and placed her back over the dirt. I came back a little later and she had her front legs in the dirt and her rear legs out of the dirt and was digging the plywood just outside the dirt! I gently moved her forward 8 inches so that her back legs were in the dirt this time, she paused, waited, waited, and then started digging in the dirt!!

4 hours, 15 minutes later I went to bed with her still digging, and she was making no new progress because her plastron was sitting on the edge of the plastic tub and her back legs were dangling over the hole - she wanted it deeper but could not get herself down any further. Nothing I could do but cross my fingers.

Long story longer, I got up at 2:30 am to check on her and SHE DID IT! she layed the eggs and covered the hole. The cool thing was that the tub was nearly clear plastic so we could watch her dig from below because she had dug all the dirt away from one side of the tub - up close and personal. She laid 5 new eggs in addition to the one last week.

After she woke up this morning I weighed her and she was down 3 pounds. I gave her a shallow bath and she drank over 3 pounds of water!

Now we just wait.....

Ben

A friend of mine who breeds redfoots keeps them on soil substrate and they usually lay in the winter time when kept indoors. You could put your female in large plastic tub filled with a soil mixture as soon as you notice laying behavior and keep her in there temporarily until you are sure she is finished. Just keep a nice big four x two tub or something similar handy for egg season and fill with a foot of soil mix.

Wow that is one stubborn tortoise!! Congrats on the eggs. What kind of tortoise is it?

Jen