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Hi guys,

as part of giving my turtle a better home, I'd like to test his water to make sure there are no bad chemicals are present.

can someone please point me to where I can find info about how and what's needed and where buy a water testing kit? are the ones you find at PetSmart useful for RES? or is there a better source for a kit without getting into big bucks?

API Freshwater master test kit is what I'd get.

http://www.drsfostersmith.com/product/p ... catid=4454

or $2.50 more at Petsmart: http://www.petsmart.com/food-care/test- ... m%3Dsearch

They're good for about a year then the test results aren't very accurate. There's a manufacture date on the cap of each solution bottle.

THANKS! VeipaCray,

Will the kit tell me what chemistry levels I want and how to go about getting them?

Todd

The three you are aiming for are ammonia, nitrite and nitrate. The kit also include pH, but that is less of an issue for turtles.

Waste from your turtle creates ammonia, which is bad. There are bacteria that convert that to nitrite, which is worse, and then other bacteria convert it to nitrate, which isn't so bad.

You do water changes to remove the nitrate. So, you want 0 for ammonia and nitrite, and you want something under 20 (some say 40) for nitrate. If you have fish or anything that gets its oxygen from the water, ammonia, nitrite and nitrate are all more of a concern than for a turtle.

Ammonia is the most toxic of the three then nitrite. Nitrate isn't super toxic to turtles but it promotes algae.

If you search this forum or the net on "nitrogen cycle" you'll get some great info.

VeipaCray is correct. I was misremembering from research I had done on the nitrogen cycle and fish specifically. One of the issues with nitrite, besides tissue damage is suffocation because it binds to hemoglobin in the blood.

For some fish, the toxic levels of ammonia and nitrite are very similar:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1 ... -8659(1978)107%3C361%3AATOAAN%3E2.0.CO%3B2

But this is for a fish known to be very sensitive to both.

For a fish much less sensitive to nitrite vs ammonia, the differences in a toxic dose of each are staggering:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12602850

Fish, that are breathing the water are much more impacted than turtles that are just drinking it. None of the three are good, but ammonia does seem to be the more dangerous.

And, largemouth bass don't seem to be affected by nitrite much at all:

http://ciresweb.colorado.edu/limnology/ ... Pub079.pdf

There's really no research I can find on either for turtles. I did find a World Health Organization paper on nitrite and nitrate intake for people that includes affects from animal studies. All studies are for mammals, and they found that ruminants were much more sensitive to nitrates than rats or mice (see section 4 for animal toxicity):

http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_hea ... 2ndadd.pdf