OT: Giant Blond Leopard Tortoise
- This topic has 2 replies, 1 voice, and was last updated 24 years, 3 months ago by .
- The forum ‘Diamondback Terrapins’ is closed to new topics and replies.
DBTerrapin / Forums / Diamondback Terrapins / OT: Giant Blond Leopard Tortoise
Attachments :Thought some of you might get a kick out of this pic. A colleague of mine bought his wife a leopard tortoise for her birthday. Here it is about a year later – man, I’ve gotta get her salad formula ’cause this thing’s humongous! And no, I did NOT do any photo manipulation in this one, honest… __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Sports – Coverage of the 2002 Olympic Games http://sports.yahoo.com
The dimension represented by that photo is off. You can see the center scute portion that the hatchling was born with, which is normally much smaller than a quarter (per scute piece). From the paralax (sp?) of the camera, it makes it appear that these are much larger than a quarter (which could only happen if the baby hatched from a tennis ball sized egg). It’s a pretty tort, but I’d guess it’s probably not much over 4″ if that. If it is, that’s not healthy for the animal. Tortoises being completely herbivorous and needing an extremely high fiber low energy diet to grow slowly and correctly. Rapid growth has been attributed to kidney and liver failure. If it can grow that fast on grasses, vetches, hay, and other non grocerystore greens, I’d be surprised.
— In diamondbackterrapins@y…, Stephen and Wylee Chew