This is the week that I spent more than two hours cleaning and disinfecting various filters, habitats, bowls, decór, nets, siphons, surgical instruments, etc. Not glamorous, but part of the job of a rehabber. First you must wash things regularly to get the dirt and gunk off. Then rinse. Then you have to soak them in a 10% bleach solution for 10 minutes, rinse again, and let dry. The difficult part of this is waiting for things to soak, unless you have a large bin to fill with bleach water for it. A viable alternative is to get bleach covering every surface of an object and lay it out somewhere for 10 minutes and then rinse it. Either way, you need a significant amount of space to clean things. A thing needs to be in contact with bleach for 10 minutes to be sterile, and you need to sterilize things in between using it for one patient and the next.
The other thing I did was change out the water bowl of hatchling box turtles. They just had a low, flat bowl filled with water. They need something to grab onto, though, when they’re that young, so there are peat moss strands in there, which I needed to try and keep in there while rinsing the bowl and giving them new water. They’re cute, though, so it’s worth it. These particular turtles were hatched from eggs that were salvaged from a gravid turtle that got hit by a car and didn’t make it. During the autopsy, Pam discovered a clutch of eggs and decided to try and save them. Miraculously, a few did survive, and if they grow up strong and healthy, despite their rocky start, they’ll be able to be released into the wild next year as juveniles or later as adults.
Turtle Haven 