Posted: Fri Jun 09, 2017 7:11 pm New RES owner, CL rescue, tons of questions !
Hi everyone,
New to the forum, and to being a turtle owner as well.
Long story short, I recently acquired 2 RES turtles from someone on Cl who was moving across the US.
He might have been doing his best, but the conditions he kept them in was terrible : 20gal tank half filled, ridiculously hot basking area, fed only hatching pellets twice a day for .. ever, very little water filtration, etc .. There's a male and a female, male's supposedly around 3yo and female a bit older, she's definitely bigger than him.
The first thing I did was switch them to a 75gal tank, started feeding them veggies (mostly red leaf lettuce so far, a couple small pieces of fruit), offering them some cuttlebone, and switched them to the "next level" of pellets which are labeled as being "growth" ones. I think they'd need to switch to the "maintenance" ones for adults pretty soon, at least for the female, but I figured it was probably better to make some kind of "transition step" in between going from the super small pellets they were used to eat to the new much larger ones for adults.
I'm new to owning turtles, and while I've done lots of research on them, I still have a couple "silly" questions I'd like to have a definitive answer on :
- both of them, but mostly the male show signs of pyramiding on the shell. From what I've seen that's unfortunately not surprising given the diet they were on. Is there something special I should do, or do I need to pay special attention to this in some way ?
- another thing I've noticed is that the male has a small "crack" in the back of his shell. It seems like an old injury, and is all healed and solid now as far as I can tell. Again, should I pay special attention to this in some way ?
- about the lighting : should I keep the heating lamp on at night ? It produces some light, but if I'm not mistaken it doesn't produce UVB (I have a different bulb for that, which is on during the day). I saw somewhere that switching on/off those heating lamps made them die faster, but was wondering if the turtles were affected by lighting at night (as long as it doesn't involve UV light), and whether they needed the basking heat as much during the night (I'm guessing that in the wild, the radiant heat is mostly present while the sun is).
Thanks in advance for your help, let me know if you needed some more info or details, I'll post pictures of the shells shortly as I assume that'll be much more helpful than a written description !