Hurtle and Myrtle

[framerguy]

Ya know how when your kids are little and they beg for a pet, and your like,"If we get this, YOU have to take care of it! I'm not gonna do it for you", and in the end...who takes care of it? That's right...you do.

Well, my daughter is 22, a senior in college, and last semester she was sure she had to have a pet of some kind at her apartment so she got two little turtles...Hurtle and Myrtle. The are very cute little guys. The green one (Myrtle) is a Cumberland Slider, I don't know what Hurtle is yet.

Well, she's gone back to school again and guess where the turtles are... .. still with me?... that's right! They're mine now.

They were in this little 10 gallon tank, with a bowl of water in the corner. They never moved much, just kind of sat around. I thought to myself there's something wrong here. I'll look these guys up...

It turns out they are aquatic turtles. I go to a local pet store that specializes in reptiles and Clint hooks me up with a basking light and a reptile filter. He says leave them in the 10g while they're little and tells me how to care for them, etc etc.

So I put water in the tank, to a depth double their shell length just like he said...and it's like I have new turtles. Hurtle, who had never opened his eyes that I saw was swimming around, crawling on rocks and asking to be handled, Myrtle wasn't far behind. I think, this is pretty cool. These guys are actually cute! Here's what they were in:


Well, a few days after I got them set up, I go behind our business to throw out trash and there at the dumpster is a 75 gallon aquarium waiting to be thrown away. It's got a crack in the bottom. So I take a piece of tempered glass I have, silicone the daylights out of it and lay it in the bottom, and resilicone all the joints (after removing the old stuff). I go to lowes and get two bags of river pebbles and two bags of play sand and now the turtle home looks like this:

It's built into the wall next to the SW tank. This was going to be the space for the new SW tank but now we are building a new house so this tank build was abandoned for the one in the new house. Now it's a turtle house. My next project for this tank is to use eggcrate, concrete and rock to build a rock wall for the back of the tank.

Here's Hurtle:


And here's Myrtle:


They are the cutest little rascals. Whenever I approach the tank they both come swimming and begging for food. They like krill..A LOT!

I hope you freshwater lovers don't mind having turtles in your forum..they are freshwater turtles after all. If anyone recognizes what Hurtle is, would you let me know?

[Woodstock]

Awwww.. they are so cute!

[framerguy]

Thanks Woody,.. I needed more additions to the managerie!

[Dentoid]

Ditto!

[kathywithbirds]

so cute! they look like sliders to me. The can eat those turtle pellets they sell at pet stores, might have more nutrition in it. Ours ate goldfish (got stinky though) and vitamin coasted flies. (dead ones, of course.)

[nanoreefsrcool]

i would definitly feed gold fish if you can you cant match the protein they get from them plus it is a more natural food source. when you feed pellets they develop a soft shell in my experence

good luck

[PEMfish]

Could be painted?

[nanoreefsrcool]

the one is a slider and the the other is a missippi map turtle

[framerguy]

Thanks Nano (it's Nick, right?), so the green one is a Cumberland Slider and the brown one is a Mississippi Map Turtle. Thanks again!