All Turtles Message Board

sunshine8 · Level 1 Joined: 19 Feb 2006 Posts: 8

Hello all...My 6.5 month old Blandings is a chow hound. However, he loves meat more than anything. We usually give him Reptomin, with an occasional mealworm, which he loves. We also have ruby red feeders in his tank, which he tries to catch, but I believe because he is young, he hasn't quite gotten the knack of being "sneaky" yet and so he hasn't caught that many yet. We sometimes catch one for him and hand feed him, and he goes bonkers when he get the net out because he knows he's getting a fish.

Anyhow, he will usually eat reptomin until I stop giving them to him, so I am unsure how many to give him. Since he is only 6 months old, I don't want to overfeed him, so I usually give him about 5 reptomin twice a day. Does that seem like a good amount?

Onto my next problem. Recently, we moved him to a 20 long aquarium (from a 10 gallon) and put real plants in and it's a really nice set up. We put some ruby reds in there and he went crazy catching about 4 of them (they were slow at first from not acclamating). He can only catch them tail first, so it's hard for him to swallow them sometimes - it's hard to watch. One of them kept coming back up and he kept swallowing it down. Anyway, he was obviously very full from eating all these fish and now it's 3 days later and he is turning up his nose at the Reptomin now. He did this before, in fact it took me a long time to get him to eat Reptomin in the first place. Now he puts the Reptomin in his mouth, then spits it out and dives down after the fish again. I tried giving him a mealworm this morning just to make sure he was eating and gobbled that down. Do I just wait a few days and make sure he's hungry enough to eat Reptomin again or what? I know he needs Reptomin in his diet, not just fish, worms and snails.

The other issue with the fish is that he is almost constantly chasing fish around the tank and hardly ever basking. I'm beginning to wonder if it's a good idea to have those fish in there. We recently put a heater in the tank and raised the temp to 72 (from 65), even though we know Blandings can tolerate colder temps. We did some research and found that even though they can tolerate the colder temps, they are actually more healthy and active at warmer temps. He's been much more active since we put in the heater, but the poor little guy just can't catch the fish anymore now that they're acclamated, and I'm not sure what to do about his eating habits.

Thoughts?