Turtle Thursday: M'Lord

This is Tyranny, but he prefers to be referred to as Lord Tyrannus. He's the dominant male in my 125 gallon tank. What does that mean? He presides over all activity in the tank and makes the key decisions on how situations should be handled.

Recently I had a challenge with Dante being a little over his ideal weight. The best way for me to handle that is to separate the one turtle during feeding time. While that worked well, the other turtles, especially his lordship, took notice of the extra attention being paid to Dante. Not noticing that Dante was being deprived of his gluttonous acts, The Lord of the Tank interpreted this as some other resident getting extra attention. Tyrannus took swift, if not jealousy charged, action. He started nipping at Dante. A couple little nips, ended up with quite a bit of superficial injuries. While none were life or limb threatening, Dante needed to be separated permanently to heal.

Jealousy. Gluttony. Not just a human emotion, but still deadly sins even for reptiles.