So my uncle, who owns the absolute biggest RES I have ever seen, finally finished his 2500gal(guessing) turtle pond. It has a 5gallon bucket underground home made filtering system that is a true example of American ingenuity, a tiki hut style basking platform island(also homemade pics coming soon)that is just beautiful, a fully chain linked in fence with fencing on the top(we have several hawk families nearby) and it's buried 8 inches under the dirt around it. So his RES looked quite lonely in this big beautiful pond, so I decided to let my Mortus(RES male about 6 inches) and Myrtle(YBS female about 4.5 inches) check out the pond as well. We sat them in the grass near the pond facing away from it and they both immediately turned 180's and dove in the pond, Mortus went straight to my uncles big female, Bertha, and started doing his mating dance, Myrtle went straight for the potted semi-aquatic plants my uncle planted and started mowing at them. After seeing how happy they were and how much more room they had I felt bad about keeping them in a 110gal for so long, I thought it was enough, and according to almost every care sheet it was more than enough, but once you see your turtles swimming in a huge homemade pond you can tell how constrained a 110gal tank is on them. So I left them:( My uncle had been wanting my male for quite a while so I said if he would care for them both he could keep them, it really broke my heart, but he is walking distance from my house so I can still visit when I want to. Still though I miss the big clumsy things. I miss going home to find what they had destroyed in my tank this time, whether it be an upside down decoration, some well planted plants dug up and floating at the top, or holes dug in the sand all the way to the glass leaving it looking quite tacky. I miss having to watch out for little love bites as I dig around in the tank lol.
So after losing 10 or more inches of turtle friday evening, saturday morning I had to try to replace them. I went to my local independent fish store and low and behold they were selling turtle hatchlings for $24.99. Now it is illegal in my state to buy any turtle under 4 inches but apparently if you sign some form saying its for educational purposes your all good, like that agricultural purposes form you use to buy illegal fireworks lol. Now the sign said map turtles, but there were distinctly two species of turtle, normal map babies and babies with black shells and red stripes in the middle, with bellies too plain to be western painteds, so I googled on my phone and found they were southern painteds, I had never even heard of them much less seen one and I thought I had researched aquatic turtles pretty thoroughly, apparently they are native to my backyard and still I had never seen one. So I bought two after seeing their care was much the same as western painteds. First thing I noticed is they are much more interested in basking than RES babies and much better swimmers.
But to get to it, my question to you all is, does anyone have experience with this subspecies? Can give me a adult size estimate? Can tell me how to sex outside the normal RES ways? Any interesting facts about natural habitat? special needs? diet in the wild? Any help will be greatly appreciated. I still miss my biguns but i'm excited about my new arrivals!!
