Setting Up a Turtle Tank

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm James Dix from Reptile Rescue Service in Salt Lake City, Utah. We're talking about setting up a turtle or a tortoise habitat or tank. So, if it's being kept inside, we'll go off, for instance, for a desert tortoise. This is the one we'll use as a topic on here. You would need to have heat lamps in there. You need at least probably a four, depending upon the size of the tortoise. If it's a small or a large. If it's a smaller one, you need at least a four by four cage for it. About four to six inches of sand. Some rocks. You can plant cactus in there so that he can actually have that as a food source, too, outside of the times that when you feed him and he doesn't have any food in there, and he wants to have a snack, he can eat one of the cactus that's in his habitat. You do have to keep these guys, in the summer, about eighty five to ninety five degrees, and then they need a cool basking area. So one side of the cage will have heat lamps that throw down like a hundred and fifty watts of heat, and then on the other side you would have, about two feet away, a cool area where there's no heat at all. You put these lights on timers so that they can be controlled how many hours a day. Twelve hours a day, eight hours a day. And then you can have them kick off, and then at night it simulates the desert, 'cause it cools off."