TL;DR treat your yard for fire ants.
This is Mary Shelley. She walked up our driveway in August 2025 and has lived in our backyard ever since. During the cold fronts (we live in central Texas and thus have mild winters) she lived indoors and we learned a lot about sulcatas.
I knew from forums and reddit to soak her and stuff, so she comes indoors a couple times a week to lounge in the sink.
Well with all this rain in April, I had to mow down really tall grass in the yard, and it exposed 4-5 huge fire ant mounds. I know from experience that when they swarm you, you can be stunned and get sick from the poison, but I was lazy and didn’t get rid of the mounds that day... and then they swarmed my Mary Shelley and my pitbull puppy! It makes me sick thinking how it would have felt to be swarmed and not be able to scratch or swipe the ants off. I’m pretty upset with myself.
So back to the bath thing… during Mary’s soaks I always scrub her plastron because she tends to back up over her turds and smear fecal matter all over herself. When I lifted her up this weekend I saw pink everywhere and decided to look all inside her shell to see if anything stood out. She was covered in bites :’( so I looked up reptile vets near me and got in with the first available, which was Dr Louth at White Rock Veterinary Hospital.
He spent a long time explaining the process to narrow down the cause of pink plastron, and going over general sulcata care. I also got to listen to her heartbeat on his Doppler! So cool by the way. Their hearts are super different from ours.
Anyways, the blood work actually showed that she’s really healthy, and the stool sample was negative for parasites… so pretty much we can conclude all the inflammation was from being swarmed by fire ants, unless something else comes up.