General Care Discussion :: How to stop mating

[tiburon]

We have two RES, one male and one female, and the male has reached the age where he wants to mate. He is constantly conducting his mating dance in front of the female, backing her into a corner. Her quality of living has gone down due to this constant annoyance. We do not want to allow breeding because we can not increase the size of our habitat any further. Are there anyways to stop him from wanting to breed without having to get rid of him? Will he eventually stop trying? She looks so sad being stuck in the corner all the time...

[megcornell]

No, there is no way to stop his advances and keep them together.
They will need to be separated.
Eventually the female will get fed up and she'll start attacking him, and given that females are larger, she could hurt him seriously.
For the sake of both turtle's health and happiness look into getting a second set up.

[powerofvoodoo]

I agree, the only way to make the male stop pestering the female is to separate them.
If the tank is large enough, you might want to look into dividing the tank instead of buying another tank.

[Starchick]

Do a search for tank divider on this forum, I've seen several people on here post pics fairly recently!

[marisa]

Welcome. A male that's constantly harassing the female can really stress her out and make life miserable (as you're seeing). How big are they and how big is the tank they're in? A divider could be a temporary solution if the tank is a larger size. It sounds like eventually they're going to have to be separated, though.

[industrial_girl_2000]

I agree with everyone here that the turts will need to be separated eventually. I went thru something similar a long time ago when I had a male living with my female RES. It started off innocently enough with just him fluttering his nails, but eventually started to get violent when she rejected him time & time again. It didn't take long before she started biting at him & broke off some of his nails all the way down to the root! Then there were times when he would bite at her foot, drawing blood. There were times when she got so mad at him that she would violently chase him around the tank trying to snap at him. One time his tail ended up sprained from her grabbing on & not letting go! All this fighting was so loud that we had to separate them & I gave the male away to a friend & just kept the female. It has been peace in my house ever since.