Every week we would weigh her box to monitor the weight change. But we do keep records of her weight and the weight of her boxes with her inside right before they entered the fridge. She seemed fine, but the frequent door opening and closing does disturb her, I feel. 😆 To cut down the light disturbance and to prevent jail break if she is awake, we put her in two layers of shoe boxes, with breathing holes on the side of course, with crumpled paper towel balls as "substrate" to bury her. The first 3 years Clydie was in our normal everyday fridge. I still think a bigger fridge is more reliable, and if you use it everyday, you will know if it breaks down. We then had to monitor a thermometer in it a few times a day to make sure the fridge works fine. It turns out the small fridge is not as reliable for some reason. It is useful also to have some other stuffs in it, because we checked every week, and noticed once that the jams were not cold enough. She then hibernated with a few jars of the homemade jams. Since the 4th year, we got her her own small fridge. But in one year, we felt that she might have woken up a few times in the fridge half time through the 3 months and dropped 5% already, so we took her out right away. In most years, her weight after hibernation only drops less than 5% in 3 months. LOLĬlick to expand.The first 3 years Clydie was in our normal everyday fridge. And if they really want to hibernate, you can't stop them. You don't need to force your tortoise to hibernate if they don't want to. My point being (if I have a point), at least for my tortoise, she seems to have her own rhythm. We're still hoping she can reach 1kg next year. Her weight has been stable for half a year at 960g now. She has been healthy and gaining weight like crazy until she hit 6 years old.
She just slowed down recently and we will be putting her to the fridge next week. So she was awake and active for the whole winter + spring + summer. She was out of her brumation in January because of the weird cycle timing, and then had her own backyard enclosure in our new house in the summer. 😅 but what can we do, she wanted to sleep. So, the cycle was about 9 months and one year she ended up slowing down in the beginning of summer. We would let her hibernate for no more than 3 months. We noticed that she would be active for about 6 months and then slow down, no matter what we tried to do (i.e. We would take her out and hibernate her in the fridge if she decided to slow down and dug herself underneath the substrate for two weeks. She always had the same temperature, same closed enclosure for the past few years, but she does slow down every year since she was one-year-old. She used to live indoor full-time until this year that we have a backyard. My Clydie, a Russian tortoises, is 6 years old now.
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