In summary, I rescued Frankie about 2.5 years ago. Took me a few months to notice it, but I realized she had some pretty bad retained scutes.
Got her eating various stuff with lots of vitamin E, and a few scutes eventually came off, but only ever marginal scutes. I tried ever so gently lifting some of the worst ones (remember, never pick off the scutes if they're shedding normally!), but they were on there solidly. So I left them as they were for the longest time.
The last week or so, I got an excellent suggestion from Painteds4life (Thanks again!
) that since it's been so long, the scutes might actually just be stuck on with algae. So I tested one of the worst scutes again, and sure enough, it popped right off!
I was able to get more than 50% of them off on the first go. Last night, I gave it another go, and now more than 90% are off!
Also worked on her plastron last night (which I hadn't done before) and got most of those off. There was a bit of a smell under the old scutes on her plastron, probably because she wouldn't get as dry on the bottom as she does on the top. But all the new scutes felt hard, and looked healthy, so I don't think there was any rot.
Anyhow, some progress pics.
Here she is when I first got her:
This is a couple weeks ago, before getting rid of any scutes. You can see a couple of marginals that are darker, those fell off on their own.
After the first round:
(you can see the few I couldn't get off at the time).
And today:
The marginals at the back were particularly hard to come off, because they wrap right around. The back two are the most stubborn. I was able to pick some of them off, but I think they're going to be really wrapped around. Hopefully I'll be able to just keep picking them off. But I was able to get off all the other marginals. You can also see how it's evened out the shape of her shell a lot. Used to be really pointy at the back.
Here's one of the ones that came off. You can see at least 4 layers of old scutes built up.
And this is one of the marginals that came off on it's own, you can see at least 2 layers separating.
Her shell looks so much better now. And it even looks like some of the scutes are getting ready to shed again. So I'm hoping the bits I wasn't able to get off will just come off naturally with the next shed.
She was really good when I was taking off the scutes. She didn't much like it when I was working on her plastron, since I had to hold her upright, but she didn't kick or bite, and my finger was quite close to her face sometimes!
And another thing, a few weeks back I posted that Frankie wasn't eating as usual. It lasted a couple weeks, but it seemed after the first round of scute removal, she was back to her normal piggy self! Don't know if the old scutes were really bothering her, or if it was something else, but it seems to be all good now
