Hello, My name is Nick. I have been reading everything I can on this site for the past week. I have gathered so much information and first of all I wanted to say thank you to everyone who has contributed to this forum. I still have lot to learn.
With that out of the way I'll get to the Blitz situation. Last weekend my wife and my seven year old son went to a street fair. I had a lot of work to do around the house so I stayed home. When they got home the boy was so excited to show me what they got. A turtle! A very little turtle that my son named Blitz. Blitz is a little smaller than a fifty cent piece. They came home with a little plastic container that had a tiny raised spot in the center and some food. I have never owned a turtle and really knew nothing about them. I asked what kind it was and my son said he was a male doctor turtle my wife couldn't remember what the guy said. After some help from Google I determined he was an RES, and that is how I found you guy's.
At this point I'm just trying to keep the little guy alive until I can get an adequate habitat for him. Unfortunately, spare money is very tight right now so I had to make do with what I have. I knew he wasn't going to last long in that little plastic thing. I don't really have the money for an actual aquarium at the moment so I had to improvise.
I needed to find a way to control the temps of the water and the basking area and this is what I came up with. I had an extra storage container that was just taking up space and holds about ten gallons of water. I had a piece of granite to use for a basking platform and I made a stand for it out of 1/2" pvc. I bought a UVB lamp and a cheap clamp on light for heat. I bought the cheapest water heater I could find. I got a whisper 20-40i internal filter and made a bubble filter with a bottle an air pump a sponge and some ceramic rings. I know it's certainly not ideal but I hope it's enough to keep him healthy and happy and most importantly alive long enough to buy me some time to get something more permanent together. If I would have known we were going to have a turtle I could have done the research prior and not had to scramble. But such is life I guess.
Here are some pictures.
This is the basic setup, I use the little plastic thing that came with him to feed him in.
Here is Blitz eying a piece of pellet.
I think my temps are right.
As I was writing this I actually caught him basking for the first time. I'm so excited
I don't know what the growth rates of turtles are but if this set up buys me a couple months to get my ducks in a row I would be happy.
I still haven't figured out a way to reliably heat his feeding bowl, I'm a little worried about pulling him from his nice warn home and plopping him down in much colder water. What I have been doing is filling a plastic cup with very hot tap water and setting that down in his feeding water to warm it up a little.
I'm still gathering ideas about what the habitat is eventually going to be but thanks to you all I know it will be appropriate for the turtle.