Baby Snapping Turtles

Baby Turtles are harder to keep healthy.

Death of a baby Mud Turtle

I was very fortunate to find a pet store that had a baby Mud Turtle in the summer of 2003. It was purely an accident. As often happens when you are not looking for something is when you find it. Mud and Musk Turtles are not kept at most pet stores because I believe that they are harder to care for and also less colorful. The brownish or black shells of the Mud and Musk Turtles probably make them less attractive than the colorful Sliders, Painted Turtles, and similar breeds. So I was knocked out when I saw this small rectangular light brown little turtle. I immediately called for a staff member to bag the turtle, as if there were suddenly going to be a rush of interested buyers. The little gal (very short tail) was kind of shy, always hiding under the various aquarium ornaments. But she thrived.

She gradually got bigger, and then we moved to a new home, and after the move the aquarium was set-up again. A few days later the little Mud Turtle was gone. I looked all over the aquarium and turned over the various bridges and artificial rock formations. No turtle. I thought maybe he had somehow climbed out. I searched around the house and under the furniture. No Turtle. After another day, I decided to take out every piece of aquarium furniture (ornaments, rocks, bridges) and check it. These plastic resin bridges and rock formations are hollow-molded so they are lighter and cheaper to produce. Most of them have holes in the bottom at their base. I pulled out each piece, let the water drip out, and then checked the hole in the base. When I got to the rock formation, it was too dark to see all the way in, but when I shook it there was something wedged in there. Sadly, it was not a rock. I could not shake it loose, so I got a screwdriver and pulled the plastic resin rocks apart, and in the top layer of plastic rock formation was the little mud turtle. She was dead. Finding an innocent creature dead like that is grim. Drowning inside the hollow of a plastic resin rock formation has to be harsh by any standard.

Apparently she tried to climb all the way up from the inside of the rock formation and she got wedged in. Why had she done this? I am guessing that the stress from the move made the normally shy mud turtle more anxious and nervous, and perhaps when she pushed the rock base up and found the dark hollow, she just wanted to crawl far away from the chaos in the newly set-up tank. Who knows? Anyhow, it was a hard lesson to learn, but I have pulled out anything that has a hollow base which any small turtle can possibly crawl into.

Turtles in a 10 gallon Aquarium

1976 or so, the turtle is in the right corner. This was one of my first aquariums after I moved to Florida from New York. It was near a window, which was good for the turtle since it got a lot of sunlight.

The tank had a lot of algae on the glass. I did not have any basking area set up for the turtles. Back then I used to take them out of the tank after school and let them run around in the back yard.

Hibernating Turtles

People who have turtles in their backyard ponds or in tanks or aquariums that are outside often find that their turtles literally run away from home. Sometimes a turtle will try to escape extreme heat or cold conditions by digging into the soil in your backyard.

Unless you live close to a canal or other body of water, it is doubtful that a turtle will be able to find a way to get to a safe body of water where it can live.

Additionally, many domesticated turtles are no longer able to hunt or scavenge for their food. These domesticated turtles are also not used to avoiding predatory fish, ducks, gulls, alligators, or people.

So if your turtle takes off one day, make every reasonable effort to try and find it. If you do not live near any body of water, the turtle probably dug itself into the ground somewhere in your yard or nearby.

If you do not find the turtle and take the turtle out of the ground wash it off and put it back in the tank, it will die if left in the standard backyard soil. More than likely you will find them some time later while planting something, and the turtle will be rotting away (shell only) a few inches under the top soil.

The standard backyard is not a good place for turtles to hibernate. When they do this in nature, they are supposed to do it by the banks of their ponds, canals, rivers, etc. These bodies of water have compacted, muddy soil on the banks near the water and that soil stays wet and hard and keeps out ants. This kind of muddy soil gets softer when it rains hard (usually Spring showers) and that is usually when the hibernating turtles wake up from winter hibernation.

The backyard soil is nothing like that, and it is full of all kinds of predatory insects, and it is not cool and moist. So before your turtle dehydrates to death and/or is eaten by red ants or other critters, try to find it in your backyard.

If you see your turtles are having trouble dealing with extreme heat or cold weather, you should use your common sense and bring the turtles indoors for a while so that they can acclimate themselves to the normal climate conditions inside your home. This will lower the stress that their biological systems have been dealing with outside.

When turtles are in the wild, they can swim or walk away from a harsh environment and seek a better place or hibernate or otherwise fend for themselves. When they are in an enclosed area, the turtles are relying on their owner to control the environment and to make sure it is healthy for the turtles.