Red-Eared Slider on Gravel

I ran the Charm City Reptile and Amphibian Rescue for 14 years (no longer in operation). Here is a story about a red-eared slider that was surrendered to the rescue.

It always makes me mad when people don’t have the correct husbandry for their animals. There is so much information available to people. I might sound like a broken record, but the number of people who don’t even look up information on the internet is astounding.

Honestly, you don’t even have to read a book. There are tons of forums on the internet where you can post a question and get a bunch of responses in a short time frame. Of course, it’s a crapshoot how good or bad the advice is. Websites with great information and care sheets abound as well.

Of course, it’s a crapshoot how good or bad the advice is. But, if you are looking on a forum and several people say the same thing, those are pretty good odds that the information is correct. There is always more than one way to do things.

But this time, well, let’s just say this woman was 100% wrong!

She was a biology teacher

The shameful thing about this incident is that the woman was a biology teacher and had no business keeping a red-eared slider the way she was keeping it.

This was back in the days when we used to go pick up animals. There are not enough hours in the day to do that now!

I went to a sketchy neighborhood to pick up a red-eared slider from a woman who told me she taught high school biology. I can’t remember if it was a classroom pet, I think it was her personal pet. Or it might have belonged to her daughter.

The woman got the turtle from a pet store and they didn’t help her with the husbandry at all. She had a red-eared slider, an aquatic turtle, on gravel. Any biology teacher worth a damn should know that flipper-like feet are for swimming, not for crawling around on gravel. The flat, aerodynamic shell is made for gliding through water – not gravel. Honestly, these are no gravel-dwelling turtles! The woman had a small water bowl, made out of a thin plastic, cheap, carry-out salad container lid. I don’t know how the turtle got in and out of that bowl without destroying it. Maybe it did destroy the container and it was replaced from time to time.

Misinformation can be deadly

Here’s the kicker… The woman told me, “It’s the funniest thing. Every time I feed him, he grabs the food, jumps into the water bowl and eats it there!”

I explained to her that they can only eat in water and they can’t swallow out of the water. I was just getting angrier and angrier, so I just shut up and left.

The woman’s house was clean, orderly and it seemed like she understood how to take care of her home. Why she couldn’t take care of the turtle was probably due to the simple fact that she simply didn’t care.

This poor animal had little more than an inch of water. Of course, you should always have a place for sliders to climb up out of the water to bask in some UV light, but they spend the majority of their lives in water.

Diet

The woman was feeding the turtle all of the wrong foods too. She was feeding it iceberg lettuce (the least nutritious type of greens available). They’ll eat lettuce, especially when they are being starved to death. But their diet is mostly made up of insects, worms, fish and then greens. A 2:1 calcium to phosphorus ratio is best like kale, collard greens and mustard greens. Red-eared sliders will even eat a (frozen-thawed) mouse if you give them one, but it makes quite a mess and really fouls up the water.

Some people like to feed their sliders in a container and let them defecate after they eat. Then, they put the turtles back into their enclosures because they are such slobs.

Because turtles are much heavier and bigger than most fish, they make a lot more of a mess than fish do. You need a big filter if you keep sliders in an aquarium. And weekly water changes are a must!

If too much ammonia and other waste accumulates, it can cause serious health issues with the turtles. If there is nowhere to get out of the water and dry off, that can cause health problems too.

The turtle was checked out by our vet and she couldn’t find any physical problems other than its pathetic inability to swim and its horrible diet.

Most red-eared sliders do fine on a commercial turtle pellet diet with some supplements of insects and greens. The commercial diets are supposed to be a complete diet, but variety is always good. We offer crickets, slugs, earthworms, greens and pellet food. Some aquatic plants are edible like duckweed. I would not suggest spending a lot of money on aquatic plants because sliders will just demolish them in a matter of days. As a treat though, it is a nice supplement to their diet.

Slider behavior

Sliders can be aggressive toward each other if they are kept in containers that are too small or if there are too many turtles. We’ve seen lots of turtles with bitten tails and toes. We see a lot of shell rot too from not being able to dry off.

People think turtles are cute and easy. They are sometimes cute, but not so easy. Female red-eared sliders get over a foot long. They need a decent amount of space – not a little plastic salad container!

I set the turtle up outside because it was summer when I got it. The little guy had forgotten how to swim or never knew from being kept on gravel. The turtle could walk around the enclosure with its head out of the water if I made the water level shallow enough. I don’t want to say that I gave the turtle swimming lessons, but I guess you could call it that. Each morning, I would put the turtle in deeper water and just watch it swim. The situation was not very good at it in the beginning. It was rather pathetic. I had to keep an eye on the poor little guy to make sure I wasn’t drowning it.

The turtle eventually learned (or remembered) how to swim and was adopted by someone with a pond.

Get useful, and more importantly, correct information with this book: Red-Eared Sliders (Animal Planet Pet Care Library)

Please leave your comments below. 

Read more by Holli Friedland.