General Care Discussion :: New Turtle owner

[Jeremiah]

There are good live plant suggestions on the "Nutrition" page of the main redearslider.com website. Lots of people use pool filter sand, but I don't usually recommend any substrate for babies or hatchlings. I'm probably just being too paranoid, though...

[Kansasslider]

I have sand and fake plants. None of my 4 turtles eat either.

[luclin999]

The new 40i filter arrived today and I just went ahead and swapped it into his existing tank because the water in there was getting pretty gross and I didn't want to move him along with a bunch of dirty water.

The 40i definitely has a higher flow rate than what I was using but I have to say that after three hours running with it so far I really haven't seen much of a difference in the water. It's still "green" and cloudy with a lot of visible, suspended particles.

How long do you think that it will have to run before it starts to make a noticeable difference?

[Jeremiah]

Give it a couple of weeks. The tank water is just cycling, and will clear up eventually. Search this forum (there are also lots of great articles on a general Google search) for posts relating to the nitrogen cycle.

[luclin999]

Checked on the turtle just as I was headed to bed last night and glad that I did.

In the four hours since I had last looked in on him the water had turned into a swamp. Nasty, cloudy and smelled terrible.

I pulled out a gallon of water and dumped it, added 2 gallons of fresh water (bringing up the level a bit, pulled the filter pack in the 40i, rinsed it out and put it back then replaced the filter cartridge in the Top Fin filter and put it back into the tank as well. Water looks better this morning. Not "Great" but not swampy either and the smell is gone.

[steve]

Very strange that a small turtle and tank would cause such a cycling problem.

[luclin999]

Very strange that a small turtle and tank would cause such a cycling problem.

I wish that I knew. One thing, I know that it can't be chlorine in the tap water killing off the bacteria. We use an activated charcoal, whole house water filtration system which removes chlorine from all of the water as it comes into the house. Our tap water tests out for chlorine at zero PPM with my kit.

I went ahead and pulled out about 1/3 of the water in his tank this morning and replaced it with fresh which helped a bit.

Maybe a lack of surface area for the bacteria to grow upon? Most of the tank is currently empty and the 40i filter only has a small amount of biomass area to work with.



Anyway, we went back to Petco today and swapped out the 20g long tank (which we hadn't used yet) for a 55g tank instead. I'll probably start setting it up tomorrow (after rinsing it out) with a small amount of water from his tank to get the cycling process started in that one without the added issues of the pet actually being in there.

Hopefully that will give the bacteria a head start before I move the little guy into it later in the week.

[steve]

Well, the filter definitely won't cut it and you should shoot for a filter rated 2 or 3 times greater for a turtle.

[luclin999]

I'm planning a water/land design for the 55 gallon tank so the water side will probably have about 20 gallons in it but I realize that the 40i won't cut it even for that much so I also have another filter ordered for the new tank.

[steve]

The land designs usually take up too much space in an aquarium. Your turtle will spend more time in water than land, and you will want to focus on water quality. More water+better filtration will require less frequent changes too.