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Hello... we are first time turtle owners and trying to make our turtle habitat great. We have already found alot of the info our petstore is providing is wrong We have 2 male RES and 1 female Yellow Cooter. We have a 55 gallon tank filled about 3/4 full.... we have a floating turtle log that they really seem to like, we did use some river rocks to make kind of a climbing hiding area in the bottom. We have two filters and of course a heater in the water and lights in the top... here are my questions:

1. Shld we add any plants at all?
2. We have the floating log but we have 3 turtles and they cannot all fit on top at once so two usually get stuck inside the log.. shld we get a dock as well?
3. We have large rock gravel on the bottom but its not bigger than their heads.. is this bad to have?
4. Not related to habitat but... what veg etc can we feed them?

Any help/advice is appreciated!

Are you sure about the sexes for all of them? If so, I assume they're more than 4inches long each? If that's the case, 55gal is not nearly enough room. Think 10gal of space for every inch of turtle.

1. Go ahead, if there's room. I have a few plants that suction to the side of the tank (made for dry terrariums but they hold up well in water). My res like to sleep on them and they pretty-up the tank a bit.

2. Ideally, the basking area should have enough room for all turts at the same time so do whatever you have to to make it bigger.

3. Anything smaller than their heads can/will be swallowed. That's not a risk I'm willing to take. Take out the rocks/gravel you have in there and replace them with large river rocks. I get mine for $1 a bag at the dollar store. You don't need to cover the bottom of the tank because that just makes cleaning more difficult. I have about 10 large rocks in mine and they like to push them around.

4. There is a list on the "Feeding-Nutrition" board up top, one is "What to Feed your res" and the other is "What NOT to feed"...it pretty much covers everything

And welcome

just to add what Jen wrote

1. I haven't tried real or fake plants, but I do believe you will need to regularly clean the fake plants.
2. You need a bigger, more stable basking area. RES and cooters grow very fast and are large adults, so I would really think about getting a larger tank now.
3. go with river rocks. If you like the look/texture of gravel, you can print out some patterns and place it underneath your tank.
4. there is also a small download/printable list in the downloads section

Thanks guys! Unfortunately, we bought everything the stupid pet store told us too.. now that we have had them a few weeks we are having questions and of course they cannot answer them or they are giving conflicting answers to what we are finding online.... the only reason we think we know the sex is b/c the pet store told us what they were... they are each about 3 inches give or take a few cm's... I am so angry at this pet store for giving out such bad info!!!!!

You won't be able to tell the sex with any reliability until their shell lengths (without the curve) are about 4 inches. (Cooters grow big.)

Califmommy9 wrote:Thanks guys! Unfortunately, we bought everything the stupid pet store told us too.. now that we have had them a few weeks we are having questions and of course they cannot answer them or they are giving conflicting answers to what we are finding online.... the only reason we think we know the sex is b/c the pet store told us what they were... they are each about 3 inches give or take a few cm's... I am so angry at this pet store for giving out such bad info!!!!!

Don't worry now that you've found this site you will be okay. It seems many pet stores don't know what they are talking about when it comes to turtles. The funny thing is if pet stores gave proper advice about turtles they would have the potential to make so much more money from the customer because a proper turtle habitat can be quite expensive.