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I noticed tonight I'm getting down on the pellets... Last time I bought Reptomin for the first time. Before, I had Nutrafin Max. Ralph didn't seem to have a preference between the two. Interestingly enough though, the other morning when I got up, I noticed almost all of the pellets I gave him the previous night were sunk on the bottom! And I've never know him to pass up food! He went back to his previous "snarfing" habbits the next day...

Anyhow, my long and rambling question is as follows:
I've noticed that the reptomin pellets have a lot more chemical stuff (in other words, stuff I can't pronounce xP) in them, where as the nutrafin gammarus only has fish meal, soy flour, wheat flour, oat flour, shrimp meal, yeast, kelp meal and fish liver meal.
(I couldn't find the amount of phosphorous in the nutrafin, even on the Hagen website.)
Do turtle pellets go bad or stale? Do Reptomin's (or some of the other recomended brands) chemical ingredients preserve the food for longer? It's usually more cost effective to buy a bigger container, but it takes longer to use it up.

Actually, as I'm writing this, I see for the first time on the bottom of the Nutrafin tin it actually has an expiry date. I suppose that sort of answers my question, but I'd like to hear others opinions...

Also, if anyone happens to know Nutrafin's phosphorous content, that would be great too

Like you discovered, most if not all big name turtle foods will have a printed expiration date. Although if you're running on low and it's looking funky then I wouldn't risk it. It takes awhile to switch foods, at first offer 50/50 of the different pellets and then slowly go to 100% Reptomin. I assume some of those chemicals keep the food fresh for a longer period of time....

Well, I've never noticed any pellets "looking" bad before (I guess I've always used them up before the expirey date) but what I did notice is that the reptomin smelled really bad when I first opened them up (compared to the nutrafin). Is that normal?

And that's what I did when I first switched him, for the first week I did 50/50 of the two kinds of pellets

Well for me when I opened my reptomin it smelt pretty bad but it was brand new so I think its pretty normal.