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  • Caring for Turtles 
    • Basic Facts about Turtles
    • Health and Safety for Turtle Keepers
    • Choosing a Pet Turtle
    • Care and Feeding of Pet Turtles
    • Turtle Respiratory Infections
    • Caring for a Gravid Turtle
    • Keeping Multiple Turtles in a Tank
    • Books About Turtle Care at Amazon
  • Your Turtle's Habitat 
    • Setting Up a New Turtle Habitat
    • Water Preparation
    • Water Filters and Filtration
    • Maintaining Water Quality
    • Proper Lighting for your Turtle Tank
    • Heating your Turtle Habitat
    • Using Live Plants in your Turtle Habitat
    • Using Ghost Shrimp in a Turtle Tank
    • Surviving Power Outages
  • Turtle Supplies at Amazon
  • Watch the Turtles! 
    • Turtle Webcam Feed
    • Pre-Recorded Videos
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How to Care for Pet Aquatic Turtles

 

Two Southern painted turtles swimming in a turtle tank with plants in background

This is site is about keeping and caring for aquatic turtles, which are turtles that live near and spend a lot of time in the water. It's intended for people who like turtles and want to keep them as pets or as a hobby.

This site is also intended to help people who just got a baby turtle (a hatchling) unexpectedly, for example at a fair or carnival, and need to learn how to take care of it right away. It includes both the simple information that beginners need to care for their new turtles, and some more advanced information for experienced turtle keepers.

This site is aimed at both teens and adults, so I have tried to keep the language and tone simple and lively, while still providing good, useful information about pet turtle care.

Turtle Care Information for Beginners

Some of the information in this site is very basic, such as how to set up your turtle tank. Other information is more advanced, such as how to maintain the water quality in a turtle tank, turtle respiratory infections, and how to care for a gravid turtle (a female who needs to lay eggs or is "pregnant"). There's also information about turtle tank filters, proper turtle lighting, and using live plants in your turtle tank if that's something you're thinking about.

As you continue to care for your pet turtles, you'll want to learn more and more about them.

Turtle swimming with head above the surface of the water with text: Find Turtle Tanks on eBay

In fact, as you grow to appreciate these fascinating animals more and more, you may find yourself becoming an amateur herpetologist. (That's a scientist who studies reptiles and amphibians.)

There are many good books about aquatic turtle care available to help you advance in the hobby.

This site won't tell you everything there is to know about keeping aquatic turtles. Turtles are very complex animals, and learning about them is a hobby that can last a lifetime.

Instead, this site provides the most important information that someone new to the turtle hobby needs to know to keep yourself and your turtles healthy and happy, as well as links to sites where you can find more advanced information.

Why Another Turtle Care Site?

There are a lot of sites on the Internet about pet turtle care, so why do we need another one?

Many of the turtle information sites on the Web are written for young children, using baby talk and cartoon pictures, and don't contain very much useful information about keeping turtles.

Other sites seem to be written for people who are already turtle experts and who want to discuss advanced topics of turtle care, which is fine; but such advanced information can be confusing for beginners.

I wanted to write an "in-between" site for beginning turtle hobbyists, ranging in age from teenagers through adults, that would focus on the basic information that beginners need when they're first getting into the hobby. I wrote this site believing the following things about my visitors:

  • That my visitors are new to the turtle hobby. They either are planning to get their first pet turtle or just got one, and they need basic information quickly.

  • That they also want to learn good turtle husbandry (which means raising and caring for animals, in this case, turtles).

  • That they will be raising their turtle indoors, in an aquarium tank or aquatic turtle habitat. Many people raise turtles in outdoor ponds, but I think using a tank is easier for beginners.

Some sections of this site also include some more advanced turtle care information, explained as clearly as I know how, for visitors who want to learn more than the basics. But those sections were still written in a way that starts with the basics, with the assumption that some visitors barely know one end of a turtle from the other.

Finally, when specialized scientific words are used, I try to explain them in context. I also have people who are new to the hobby read through the site from time to time to advise me when they find things that I could do a better job of explaining.

About Our Turtles

The turtles who originally appeared on this site's video feed were purchased especially for this site in February of 2004 when they were hatchlings. ("Hatchlings" are what "baby turtles" are called.)

Those turtles have grown up and are adults now. They outgrew the tank that I used for the video feed and stopped getting along; so they were moved to separate, bigger habitats.

The turtle in the cached video feed now hatched in December of 2015. It is a Southern Painted Turtle (Chrysemys picta dorsalis). There used to be another turtle in the tank, but they started fighting and one had to be moved to another habitat.

The Southern Painted Turtle is my favorite specie of painted turtle to keep as a hobby, and I think they're a very good choice for beginning turtle hobbyists. Here's why:

  • Southern Painted Turtles are hardy and relatively easy to care for.

  • They have very pleasant, funny personalities and quickly learn to recognize their keepers and other family members.

  • They're very animated (that is, they move around a lot). They're hyper and they love to swim and explore, so they're very interesting to watch.

  • Southern Painted Turtles are among the smallest aquatic turtles, so they don't need quite so big a habitat when they grow up. Male (boy) Southern Painted Turtles grow to about five inches (about 13 centimeters), and females (girls) can grow to about seven inches (about 18 centimeters). That makes them the smallest of the painted turtles, and one of the smallest of the aquatic turtles in North America.

  • Southern Painted Turtles are very pretty. They're called "painted turtles" because of their coloration, which looks like someone painted them with an artist's brush.

I hope you enjoy this site and learn from it. Turtles are beautiful, fascinating pets, and keeping turtles is a wonderful hobby that can provide a lifetime of enjoyment and education.

Have fun!

 

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Turtle at the bottom of a tank poking its head from the rocks ready to be fed with text: Find Turtle Food on Amazon. Turtles swimming underwater with light shining down into the water from the surface with text: Find Turtle Lighting on Amazon. Turtle swimming with head above the surface of the water with text: Find Turtle Tanks on eBay. Turtle sleeping peacefully in clean water at the bottom of a tank with text: Find Turtle Tank Filters at Amazon. A small turtle at the bottom of a tank with text: Find Turtle Tanks on Amazon. Turtle swimming next to the heater in a turtle tank with text: Turtle tank heaters at Amazon Turtle swimming next to bubbles with text: Turtle tank air pumps at Amazon. Turtle swimming amongst the leaves of an artificial plant with text: Turtle tank decorations at Amazon. Turtle peeking out from between the leaves of a plant with text: Shop for live aquarium plants at Amazon.

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MyTurtleCam.com is an educational site for hobbyists interested in aquatic turtle care. All information provided is accurate to the best of our knowledge and belief, but is presented for educational and informational purposes only. No information on this site should be considered authoritative with respect to human health or animal health and husbandry. Copyright © 2009 - 2023. All rights reserved.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. All product links on this page are monetized.

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