Welcome to My Turtle Photo and Information Page Created March 2008
In March we just got a adorable little Yellow Belly Slider. All the information on this page is for Yellow Belly Sliders, but most Slider turtles have similar requirements. In the first photos you will notice we had blue gravel in the tank. That is before I found out it can be bad for turtles, so it was removed and in the more recent photos you can see black rocks and the glass beads that we replaced the gravel with. It's a lot of fun to have and observe a young turtle, but it's also not a pet to be taken on lightly. They have a long life span of forty years or more and it really should be a lifetime commitment to get a turtle for yourself or your family.
They need a lot of space or else their muscles will atrophy and stiffen up if they don't have plenty of room to swim. A young turtle can swim well so you shouldn't put one in anything smaller then a ten gallon tank to start off with. It's been said a turtle needs ten gallons for every inch of shell, so if you have a two inch turtle it really needs a twenty gallon tank and so on. Every turtle grows differently and growing faster is not necessarily a good thing. Too much protein can lead to shell deformations like curling and what's known as Shell Pyramiding where the scutes, (the little divisions on the top of the shell) expand outward and become permanently deformed. It stresses their organs and they can die from it if it isn't corrected in time.
The general rule is to feed a turtle what you think would fit inside their head if it was hollow, and to feed hatchling turtles once a day for the year of their lives. Then you should move towards a new feeding schedule of once every other day. Besides commercial turtle pellets, they also like to eat other foods:
Some fruits like bananas, strawberries and honedew melons
Veggies like Romain Lettuce, Kale, Red leaf Lettuce and Carrots
Live or frozen foods like Crickets, Ghost Shrimp, and Feeder Fish
They also need special lighting, to bask in they need heat so a regular household bulb will suffice for that usually put into a ceramic or porcelin socket clamp lamp you can get a Lowes or Home Depot. Then they need a UVB bulb so they can properly digest calcium by making Vitamin D3. There is much more to turtle care then I've gone into here, but I wanted to get people started on understanding what's involved with getting a turtle like our little fellow, Mr. Turtle, otherwise known as Mr. T. We don't know for sure he is a he, but if he turns out to be female (and they can get as big as 8-13" whereas males get to be 5-8" long) we'll call her Misty, which is almost the same sounding name as Mr.T. At the bottom of the page I will link to the most awesome forum and website I have found that turtle owners or people interested in getting a turtle should check out and read over. Three weeks after finding it and I am still finding new information to read there! Hope you enjoy the photos!
Soon I will be posting some youtube videos of him so check back for those in a couple weeks! As promised here are the links I mentioned above:
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