Fred the Red-Eared Slider @fred-the-turtle-blog - Tumblr Blog

Just to make it official

Um, so I haven’t touched this blog much lately. Partly because I haven’t been on tumblr much in general. So I’m going to officially declare this blog closed!

Fred is doing fine :) Her pump sometimes floats up and we have to push it back down. My brother, her true owner, is planning to take her this summer once he gets a house.

Thanks to everyone who’s watched this blog! I hope someday we can meet again <3

I just got a yearling red eared slider and he won't eat yet so I was wondering if you could give me some advice

Red-eared sliders need a balanced diet. Give him commercially sold pellets (ReptoMin is recommended) and feeder animals, such as crickets.

Young turtles are mostly carnivorous; their protein intake is important. My brother fed Fred mealworms, crickets, spiders, and other treats.

However, they do need nutrients from pellets in order for their shells to properly develop, depending on how much sunlight they get.

As your turtle matures, also supplement his diet with fresh (organic) vegetables.

Young turtles need to eat daily; older ones (such as Fred) may skip a day. At the same time, do not overfeed your turtle.

Also, turtles are messy eaters. It’s good if your buddy can eat the pellets whole. Some sites recommend having a second tank for feeding.

#turtleowner180

fred-the-turtle-blog

Hello! I just got two baby Red-Eared Sliders. Their habitat before I bought them was pretty horrible. Do you have any advice you could give me about how to care for them (esp. how to get them to eat)? Thank you!

Though they may be very small now, turtles can grow to marvelous sizes, so they will need a very large tank. Fred’s tanks have generally been near sunlight, but not in direct sunlight (usually a window facing north).

Naturally, the tank should be deep enough for them to swim about comfortably, but there should also have an artificial shore of sorts, somewhere that the turtles can climb up onto and bask in sunlight. Before Fred had her current tank, she lived in a plastic storage container and her “shore” was a large, smooth rock. Before that, it was a tupperware box turned upside-down.

Be careful if you use gravel, though—turtles sometimes swallow gravel, and that may cause internal damage, so you should make sure the gravel is too large to swallow.

As for eating… The brand we feed Fred is ReptoMin. Red-eared sliders can be picky eaters; some days they will eat ravenously, and other days they won’t touch a single pellet.

As for how often the water needs to be changed, that depends on the filter you’re using. If it becomes too murky to see your turtles, that’s probably a sign that the water needs changing.

Fred is actually the only one of five baby turtles still alive—the others died before I was born. Unlike a lot of the other pet blogs on tumblr, the blog owner is technically not the pet owner, so I don’t know as much about Fred’s earlier years. My brother used to feed Fred bits of freshly chopped vegetables, though.

applepuke

It’s important to note that sunlight filtered through glass or plastic does NOT give your turtle the vitamin D3 they need to grow and develop properly. Generally I would recommend buying both a UVB and heat lamp (especially if you live in a place that has four seasons, in which case you might also need a tank water heater). It’s also vital that the basking dock is big and dry enough that the turtle can climb on and get themself dry completely.

If you want to have some substrate for the tank floor, options are sand (harmless if swallowed, although hard to maintain) or coral (gives the turtle more calcium if swallowed, I use this personally).

I believe that pellets alone are inadequate for a turtle’s diet, although it can take up much of their diet when they are hatchlings. Red-eared sliders are mostly carnivorous when young (they need the protein and calcium to grow) but become more herbivorous as they grow older. I’ve had to experiment with different vegetables and fruits to see which my turtles liked: so far I’ve discovered they like leafy vegetables (they don’t eat the stems), grapes, tomatoes and some berries. Sometimes as a treat I also get them live water plants to munch on (duckweed, water hyacinth etc) though they destroy and kill those in a couple of days. I also feed them leftovers from when my family eats seafood (they love prawn shells and discarded meat parts) and there are also dried shrimp, krill, bloodworms and mealworms from the pet store that they like.

Hatchlings that have just been moved to a new environment usually don’t eat for a while; just make sure food is available and when they get settled down they should start eating!

fred-the-turtle-blog

Listen to this person! My family has only an amateur understanding of Fred’s needs compared to my brother. And we too shall strive to observe this person’s advice, for Fred’s sake.

Fred’s diet

We have changed the brand of her food. It appears that she's a bit of a messy eater, which makes perfect sense when attacking cricket-sized lifeforms, but ReptoMin pellets were more likely to just disintegrate and cloud up her tank.

She now eats ZooMed pellets, which are round instead of long, and which she can consume in a single bite. This slows the rate at which the water becomes cloudy, and also mitigates the population of tiny red worms living in the filter.

It also means that when the water becomes cloudy, it is from her waste, and not from something harmless to Fred (i.e. food).

Now, whether or not Fred is happy with the change in the shape of her food, she also felt like taking a little “snack”.

My brother (Fred’s original owner) decided to clean her tank. While inspecting her face for any irregularities, Fred reached forward and tried to bite a chunk out of my brother’s nose.

Even so, my brother’s love for Fred would not let him set her down roughly. Even with his nose bleeding onto the ground, he set her down gently. Additionally, with winter approaching, we are getting into the habit of covering her tank with a tarp again.

As for my brother’s nose, we washed and cleaned the wound, applied ointment, and bandaged it. Almost a perfect circle of skin was hanging, but no flesh was lost. The nose has since healed.

Hello! I just got two baby Red-Eared Sliders. Their habitat before I bought them was pretty horrible. Do you have any advice you could give me about how to care for them (esp. how to get them to eat)? Thank you!

Though they may be very small now, turtles can grow to marvelous sizes, so they will need a very large tank. Fred’s tanks have generally been near sunlight, but not in direct sunlight (usually a window facing north).

Naturally, the tank should be deep enough for them to swim about comfortably, but there should also have an artificial shore of sorts, somewhere that the turtles can climb up onto and bask in sunlight. Before Fred had her current tank, she lived in a plastic storage container and her “shore” was a large, smooth rock. Before that, it was a tupperware box turned upside-down.

Be careful if you use gravel, though—turtles sometimes swallow gravel, and that may cause internal damage, so you should make sure the gravel is too large to swallow.

As for eating… The brand we feed Fred is ReptoMin. Red-eared sliders can be picky eaters; some days they will eat ravenously, and other days they won’t touch a single pellet.

As for how often the water needs to be changed, that depends on the filter you’re using. If it becomes too murky to see your turtles, that’s probably a sign that the water needs changing.

Fred is actually the only one of five baby turtles still alive—the others died before I was born. Only my brother, Fred’s original owner, can tell about Fred’s early years. He used to feed Fred bits of freshly chopped vegetables, though.

#spark talks #superpsychgeek

So over the holidays, we put away Fred's cleaning stuff and never took it back out.This has caused a problem as Fred's tank became increasingly filthy. A few days ago, my mom joked that "we don't even know if the turtle is still alive".

Thankfully, Fred is alive and kicking. Her shell is coated with algae but alive. I started cleaning her tank today but couldn't find the cleaning equipment, which means cleaning will have to resume when my dad comes home tonight. Luckily, she can spend the day in cleaner water.

I should probably get a picture of her tank too, but my phone is dead and the only working camera (with which the above pictures were taken) is extremely impractical.

#cleaning #fred #red eared slider