Hercules moved home today! He's been staying with me while I've been giving him antibiotics, and we've been getting his tank situated at Michael's. It's a 45 gallon, and I'm excited about that mainly because it means he'll (hopefully) be getting more exercise and slim down. I've started to wonder if the heavy breathing and wheezing is due less to RI than it is to his weight. We're finishing up the antibiotics anyway, but definitely will be watching to see what happens as he loses a bit of weight. To start, he is pretty scared of the new tank. He doesn't understand the current from the filter, the clear bottom of the tank, or being able to swim up down and sideways. He's always been in a ten gallon with at most 4 inches of water. So he spent a bit of time panicking and frantically swimming straight up, hitting the filter current, going straight down, hitting the bottom and so on. Never really catching on that he could go sideways to get out of the way. Overall it's been a rough night on him, starting with his shot, then an hour drive during which he did not settle down at all. I transported him in a dark box with a towel, hoping he'd go to sleep, but he tried to escape, and soiled the towel
Poor baby is not a good traveler. Hopefully though he won't be needing to go anywhere for a while. Anyway, once in the tank, after a bit of time not enjoying all his new water, he figured out the basking dock. That I'm glad about, since it took Napoleon about 3 weeks. Although I'm afraid he might just spend all his time up there, he was so tired out from all his swimming. Hopefully he'll get stronger and be able to swim more. I think he'll be happy once he's acclimated. My other excitement for the evening was going to Michael's and finding that his friends were over to play WoW. Imagine three geeks begging me to name my turtle Bowser. Yeah. So that's his middle name, they decided they could live with that. Unfortunately I won't be able to post any habitat pics until Thursday, but I will asap!
