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so i have a pretty heavily planted tank that i would like to add a razorback to, but i have some growing concerns.
- substrate: currently tank is planted with caribsea Flora-Max. My main concern would be impaction. has anyone used this stuff before? its no where near as big as regular aquarium gravel, but its larger than sand.
- C02: currently the tank is not pressurized with C02, just using Seachem Flourish excel, but was thinking of doing pressurized down the road. would this cause ill effects on turtles?
- lastly, Would plant ferts like seachem flourish and flourish excel be harmful to the turtle?
im assuming that the seachem line of plant ferts would not be dangerous to the inhabitants of the tank, most set ups that i have seen that are medium to heavy planted and are dosed with floursih tend to have bountiful amounts of all kinds of aquatic life. looking for some thoughts and opinions?

*edit*
back to the first point i made about substrate and impaction: im wondering if my carpet of dwarf hair grass is thick enough if it would even be an issue, if the turtle cant get to the substrate. this is not my tank, but it is a good representation of what it looks like currently, just on a smaller scale. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siA5ZpFJork. i will be redoing my aquascape and adding more moss covered driftwood and rearranging some of the rocky outcrops and what not to cater more towards a razorback habitat.

I don't know about the Flora-Max, but razorbacks seem to like river rock (more natural for them). Flourish Excel is safe for fish, so it should be safe for turtles. I'm not sure about pressurized CO2, but people do supplement CO2 in planted turtle tanks.

thanks steve,

what i might do is remove all my plants, then add about 1.5" of pool filter sand on top and then replant everything. i would like to keep the plants, but if not i can transplant them to somewhere else as i would rather have another turtle. ive seen some nice setups for razorbacks on youtube with sand. Would sand be alright, or should i just stick with river rock? The only place i can find real info for razorbacks is austins turtle page, do you have any other good sources for information?

How big is the tank? Why not try both?

These look like good sheets:
http://www.tortoisetrust.org/articles/musk.html
http://www.chelonia.org/articles/sternotheruscare.htm
http://razorbackmusk.blogspot.com/p/mus ... sheet.html

I don't think ATP has updated their content in a long while and sometimes you get more info searching under the scientific name - Sternotherus carinatus

The CO2 won't harm the turtle AS LONG as you're not injecting and diffusing so much to cause wild PH swings. Turtles breathe air so a slighly higher level of CO2 in the water won't bother them.

thanks for the replies!

steve,

the tank is currently a 20 long, measuring 30" x 12.5" X 12.5. the entire tank will be transplanted to a 40 gallon breeder once the turtle is large enough.