Hello,
I adopted a pair of RES this weekend from the son of a friend I had previously worked with. He decided that keeping aquatic turtles were too much work for him.
I have kept both freshwater fish (cichlids, catfishes, plecos) and painted turtles in the past. RES are new to me, but I doubt they'll be any more difficult than what I have kept before.
The challenge I have now is that this weekend also had an ice storm and I currently do not power at home and haven't had it for over 30 hours. The ETA for restoration is 12/26, though I suspect (hope) that that is a Scotty estimate and it will be back sooner. My house is currently at 50F, and the tank is obviously experiencing a drop in temperature. I have been removing a small portion of the tank water, heating it up on the gas stove in a stainless steel kettle, and then adding it back in. The lowest I have seen the temperature is around 62/64F after the night, and they were both alive, though sluggish. While I had set an alarm to get up in the early morning, I slept through it and got to them a bit later. I've been heating the water to get the temperature back up to the higher 70s, ideally even 80F. I've had power outages with fish and turtles before, but fortunately not during the winter and temperatures were not a major concern then.
My concern is as I cannot be at home all day as I need to work and all, and my concern is how low of a temperature and how long of exposure they can survive or recover from. They are fairly large, about 7 inches, I haven't taken the time to measure them. The tank they are in is a 40 gallon, with about 25 gallons in it perhaps. They can reach to breathe without much effort. I don't plan to feed them until I get power and temperature control back, and if it is not back by the time I get home, I plan on moving them in a smaller tank to another place that has power so I at least can keep them heated.
