If you’re a serious pet lover, you might have heard people claiming that turtles require less upkeep than cats and dogs and are slightly exotic than the goldfish. However, they don’t tell you that they need a good amount of specialized care and maintenance that can span a lifetime.
When you adopt a turtle, you need to be sure that you have the resources, space, and capability to give them the best living conditions. Besides the fact that these creatures don’t resonate well with kids, they also need a clean environment, surplus food, and a basking area to take in UVB rays every day.
These are the common turtle care mistakes you should avoid if you are thinking of bringing these docile, calm, and shell-carrying reptiles home.
Putting a Turtle in a Small Tank
When you bring a turtle home as a baby or hatchling, you must consider its approximate size as an adult. Although turtles won’t grow to adulthood overnight, they’ll do it sooner than later. Failure to give your turtle ample habitat can create many problems in the future.
A small tank not only makes your turtles feel constrained and stressed but also gets dirty faster and may even cause the aquarium to start stinking. Providing your turtle pet with enough space gives them the freedom to stretch, swim and exercise.
When shopping for a turtle tank, the general rule is that every inch of a turtle’s shell needs a least 10 gallons of water. More importantly, you need to remember that females will become bigger than males, so if your pet is female, you’ll need a bigger tank.
As with any pet, the bigger the space, the better. Having a larger aquarium means you won’t need to clean it twice every week. If you’re planning to bless your home with a pet turtle, the first mistake you should avoid is to put it in a tank that’s too small.
Not Providing the Right Diet and Overfeeding Your Turtles
Different turtle species have different dietary needs. While some are strictly vegetarian and others carnivorous, some survive on both plant-based and animal-based foods. Luckily, there are several commercially manufactured diets that supply all the vital nutrients turtles need. Unfortunately, not all turtles will agree to consume these highly nutritious pellets.
If you don’t provide your turtles with the proper diet, they will start having deficiencies that may lead to illnesses. Giving your turtle an incorrect diet can lead to pyramiding, a condition caused by feeding your turtle too much protein, or Metabolic Bone Disease, caused by lack of Calcium, UVB, and Vitamin D.
One dangerous trait about turtles is eating without stopping if they love what is offered. For this reason, it is easy to overfeed them if you’re not careful. And the worst part about giving turtles too much food is that they’ll gain not only weight but also acquire an untreatable condition known as pyramiding.
Pyramiding is a serious condition where turtles’ shells start to protrude outside due to overfeeding, especially eating too much protein. The bumps formed due to pyramiding become part and parcel of the shell, making the carapace look uneven.
Pyramiding may not be dangerous, but it affects the outlook of your turtle and can lead to the reptile becoming injury prone, especially when the bumps become too pronounced. Additionally, this condition is irreversible, meaning the lumps will remain even if you take corrective measures.
Therefore, to ensure your turtle retains its inherent beauty and doesn’t suffer deficiency illnesses, you should provide the proper diet and avoid overfeeding it.
Not Providing Your Pet Turtle with a Basking Area
The other mistake you should avoid when taking care of your turtle is failing to provide a basking area. Unlike human beings who bask for the tan, turtles are cold-blooded and rely on external heat to control their internal body temperature.
Turtles need to alternate between basking and swimming to maintain optimal body temperature. Basking helps warm the bodies while swimming brings the cooling effect. Besides food, the other crucial thing that a turtle habitat should have is a source of heat and light.
Basking under the sun allows turtles to absorb UVB light, essential for the production of Vitamin D3. This vitamin helps the turtle’s body to absorb and utilize calcium. If your pet turtle doesn’t get adequate UVB, it can suffer from severe health complications, including slow growth and Metabolic Bone Disease.
Conversely, basking helps turtle’s shell dry out and prevent leeches and fungal infections. Water parasites, fungus, and bacteria thrive in moist conditions. Basking also dries the algae trying to grow on the turtle’s shell.
Turtles in the wild can bask on the riverbank, seashores, on logs, or get closer to the surface and take in the sun’s warm rays when still in the water. Sea turtles such as green turtles and freshwater turtles such as terrapins are known to bask out of the water.
Based on the turtle species you choose, you should provide a carefully designed basking area to ensure that this docile creature gets adequate heat and UVB light. If the aquarium you’ve prepared allows access to natural sunlight, the better. However, you can artificially provide sufficient heat and UVB light using specialized UVB lamps and heat lamps.
An ideal basking spot should be safe, stable, dry, and accessible.
Handling Your Turtle All the Time
Turtles, especially baby turtles, are cute, docile, and look like excellent pets for any household, but they should not be confused with cats and dogs. While puppies and kittens like to be petted and touched, that’s not the same case for turtles. By definition, turtles don’t fall under the category of domesticated animals.
Since turtles lack the cognitive capability to feel and show affection, they should not be handled often unless necessary. Yes, turtles get accustomed to people who feed them regularly. Sometimes they even seem slightly excited when they see you approaching, but this is probably because they think you have some food and not because they feel affection.
Apart from lacking the ability to be affectionate, there are many reasons why handling turtles should be limited to necessities. First, these creatures carry the Salmonella bacteria in their bodies. When you handle them regularly, you may end up contracting Salmonella, which is associated with severe diarrhea and vomiting.
Secondly, turtles are always wet and sometimes covered by algae that grow in water. This means that you need to let them dry off before you try to handle them. By letting them out of the water, you’ll be interfering with their lifestyle.
Lastly, these shell-carrying reptiles don’t like the handling and will often snap, hiss, or retract into their shells when you try to touch them. What other sign would you need to understand that these creatures don’t like being hoisted up or cuddled? Don’t make the mistake of trying to lift your turtle every time.
Limit handling to serious routines care practices such as when cleaning its habitat, when conducting health checks or when there’s an emergency. Like the tropical fish in an aquarium, you should enjoy watching the turtle as it feeds, swims, or basks in its tank instead of flopping it on the floor or your hand.
Failure to Research or Get Enough Information
Individuals looking for new pets get emotionally excited and charged up most of the time. This makes them forget to do their due diligence and collect relevant information about the pet they want to bring home. Rather than digging deeper to find everything about turtles, they assume they are good to go just because they know how to fill a tank with water and where to buy turtle pellets.
One detrimental mistake you can make when adopting a turtle is failing to research and know everything about it beforehand. Although there are claims that turtles don’t need much attention like dogs and cats, it’s completely wrong to bring a turtle into captivity, whereas you know nothing about it.
Despite the widespread notion that they are less strenuous, turtles need specialized care that can only be provided if you are conversant with intricate details about their existence. You need to know the species, diet, habitat, and reproduction cycle. Imagine adopting a map turtle as a hatchling and putting it in a small aquarium only for it to grow to twice its current size in the first year.
When you decide to add a turtle to your list of pets, you need to have enough information about the turtle species that interest you. If you fly blind, you might come to realize that the turtle needs more than you can offer. Luckily, you can conduct in-depth research online or get all the information you need about turtles by visiting the turtle shelter near you.
Keeping Too Many Turtles in a Tank
When young, turtles usually get along and seem friendly. However, when they grow up, they become aggressive and start to fight all the time. Therefore, keeping too many of these shelled reptiles in the same tank is a recipe for disaster.
Naturally, turtles are solitary and independent animals that scavenge for food alone. In the wild, they live as groups not because they are social animals but because the habitats they reside in have conditions that favor them all. Inherently, these creatures don’t have a social structure and don’t do things that will qualify them as friendly. Wild turtles live together because everything they need is in that same spot.
When domesticated, turtles differ in how they behave towards each other. Juveniles tend to live cohesively but start fighting when they become adults. While you can keep young turtles together, you need to plan how to separate them when they become adults if you don’t want to be watching constant wrangles and fights every day.
Turtles will fight for everything from food to mating partners. Conversely, they are naturally territorial. The strongest turtle in an aquarium will establish dominance by fighting weaker turtles. These fights can sometimes be fierce enough to leave turtles with severe injuries. If you want to avoid constant fights, it’s imperative to keep turtles in different tanks or plan how to move them when they become adults.
Sealing the Top Part of the Tank
Covering the top part of a turtle tank isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but you should mind what you’re using as a cover since it can affect the conduciveness of the tank.
Often, turtle owners place turtle tanks in a sunshine-lit room to enable them to absorb the much-deserved UVB. While this is an excellent step, most people make the worst mistake of covering the tank with glass, Perspex, or solid plastic. However, they don’t know that such a cover renders sunshine non-beneficial.
Materials such as plastic, glass, and Perspex sieve out the UVB rays that turtles need to survive. By covering an aquarium with such materials, you nullify the benefits of the sunshine, and everything you did to ensure that your turtle gets ample heat and UVB light will prove futile.
Additionally, using a plastic, Perspex, or glass cover can lead to the temperature inside the tank going beyond the optimal level. This will make the turtle uncomfortable and increase the rate of water evaporation into the environment. The glass can also break and fall into the tank, disturbing the turtle’s habitat.
Although turtles can bask in the hot sun for hours, being in hot water for long can interfere with their internal temperature regulation. The high temperatures in the water can also hasten the rotting of excess food particles in the tank, leading to an awful smell.
Covering the turtle tank helps prevent foreign objects from falling into the tank and prevents mature turtles from trying to escape. However, if you want to cover the aquarium, it’s recommended that you use something that has holes to allow the UV rays into the tank.
Having a Subpar Filtration System
Having a poor filtration system is one of the areas that most first-time pet owners mess around with. Since turtles are known to pass more pee and poop than fish, their water tanks get dirtier faster. And since clean water is the most integral aspect of keeping your pet turtle healthy, you should invest in the right filtration system for your aquarium.
The turtle tank filters help remove solid waste and urine by converting urea into a less smelly compound. Due to the excess waste produced by turtles, their tanks have to use special filters that boast more filtration media and pass more water than the fish tank filters.
However, most turtle owners prefer using fish tank filters since they are readily available. However, a rule of the thumb when using fish tank filters in a turtle tank is that you need one rated two or three times as much water as in the tank. So, if you have a 60-gallon turtle tank, you need a filter designed for a 120-gallon fish tank.
The turtle tank will clog with dirt faster without an efficient filtering system. The worst part is that this can make the aquarium stink, and you’ll have to clean it twice every week. To ensure that your pet turtle stays in clean water and that you don’t have to clean the tank regularly, you’ll need to invest in a powerful filtration system.
Not Allowing Your Turtle to Exercise
Many people think that turtles are alright staying in their enclosure without exercise. However, this is further from the truth. Like any other animal, turtles also need to exercise regularly to kill boredom, stretch their legs, and live their best lives.
You may think that there’s nothing much you can do for a turtle, but one of the most enriching activities is letting them out of their enclosure and allowing them to walk around your compound. In the wild, turtles usually leave their habitats to explore the surrounding environment. This is an essential ritual that helps them exercise their legs and have a breath of fresh air.
Not letting your shell-carrying friend exercise increases boredom and makes the creatures easily agitated. Once you bring a turtle to your household, you should let it out of its tank and allow it to wander around the compound. Little gestures such as allowing your turtle to walk around the compound provide mental stimulation and meet the creature’s natural inclination to explore.
You can allow the turtle to take supervised strolls in an enclosed space or out in the backyard. However, you need to be present when turtles are roaming around the compound to ensure that they don’t fall prey to other pets such as cats or dogs or other wild animals such as foxes.
Since it’s is impossible for you to be taking these reptiles out on a walk now and then, you need to ensure that they can access a large aquarium or pool where they can exercise when you’re not around.
Failing to Offer Varying Food Sources
Out in the wild, turtles have the luxury of eating a varied diet that comprises plant-and animal-based products. However, when you domesticate these creatures, you’ll notice that they tend to favor specific food sources over others. Even if your pet turtle loves meat than anything else, you must ensure that their diet comprises all the essential nutrients from fruits and vegetables.
Since meat may be a rare commodity for turtles in the wild, most get nutrients from plants, fruits, vegetables. If they discover that they can get meat in captivity, they might try to ignore other food sources completely, hoping to get a bountiful slice of flesh in every meal. You should train your pet turtle to eat various foods for optimal growth.
Juveniles and baby turtles require lots of protein for growth and development. However, this doesn’t mean that they should exclusively get the protein from meat. You need to provide them with various protein sources such as seeds, nuts, and even vegetables.
If you make the mistake of showing young turtles that they can exclusively feed on a particular type of food, it will be challenging to introduce different kinds of food later in life. Therefore, you must train your pet turtle to source essential nutrients from various food sources from the initial stages.
Mixing Turtles with Other Pets without Supervision
Although the internet is riddled with videos of various pets living together as lifelong friends, this is not always the case. The worst mistake is to think that turtles can live with cats and dogs without supervision. The pets might seem harmonious at first, but it takes a second for the killer instincts to kick in, and the turtle will be turned into prey.
Whether you’ve trained your pets to be gentle and welcoming, there’s no way they will interact with a turtle without getting curious and trying to scratch or chase it around. So, when choosing a location for a turtle tank, make sure that it’s far away from other pets’ habitats. More importantly, ensure that all interactions are supervised, especially when the turtle is out of its enclosure.
Remember, it’s not only the turtles at risk; they also carry Salmonella, which they can transmit to other pets. Therefore, before you decide to let your pets have a get-together, ensure that you have put appropriate measures in place. Be around to offer supervision at all times and times.
Stressing Too Much
Even if you only have basic knowledge about turtles, worrying and stressing too much doesn’t help. Turtles are among the most resistant animals that have been around for more than 230 million years. It will take unimaginable recklessness to disappoint and disappoint these shell-carrying creatures.
As long as you’re doing your best to provide these creatures with the most favorable living conditions, they’ll be ok. You’re actually giving them more than what they get in the wild, if you think of it. In their natural habitats, they have to hide from predators, scavenge for their food, and even basking under sunlight is not guaranteed. So you shouldn’t beat yourself too much.
Final Verdict
Turtles are not the most complicated animals to keep as pets in the world. However, the greatest determiner of how these creatures will fair under your care will depend on how well you can avoid the mistakes discussed in this write-up.
If you want to give your turtles the best lifestyle, arm yourself with all relevant information, provide a suitable living environment, ensure they’re well-nourished, and avoid handling them too much. Of course, it’s impossible to get everything right, but if you focus on avoiding most of the mistakes, then you’ll have nothing to worry about.
