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My turtle has two feeder fish in the tank and he doesn't even notice them. Just ignores them. He just plays around the bars of the zoomed turtle dock. I've heard of people putting a ping pong ball in the tank for them to push around. Is that safe?


What kind of things can I give him to do? Should i get him one of those floating logs from the petstore? I'm just scared he would get stuck in the holes. I don't know.


Help?

Turtles aren't mammals, they don't 'play'. Here's my 2 cent however: a tank as natural looking as possible (i.e. with a substrate, plants, fish, drifwood, rocks) would stimulate your turtle's curiosity and you'd see him explore its surroundings, searching for food, digging around, and so on.

Have you heard of anyone using ping pong balls?

Yes, you can use it though most RES lose interest in them fairly quickly.

I don't know what you have in the tank, but if it's pretty bare, adding some different objects as noted above would make his enclosure more interesting. Adding a handful of river rocks gives them something to push and forage around. If your RES is anything like mine, he'll adopt a few favorites and spend time fluttering at them.

I recently got a floating log and it's perfect. I had to tie mine down to keep it in one place though.

- spike

I have a large plant, and a cave made of a storage unit with little bars and some rocks and my turtles are constantly playing with their stuff and rearranging their tanks.

I had old 'hermit crab shells'- basically look like big snail shells, and my turtles push them and around and try to get the non-existant snails out of them. Both of them REALLY like to eat snails, too.
Mine ate all but 2 of their minnows last time, and now they occasionally chase the fish but don't seem interested in actually catching them.

What do you feed them? I find varying the diet and having veggies in the tank seems to keep them more active than just pellets.

Also whenever i clean the tank i slightly rearrange the decor at the bottom, and they swim around looking at everything like it's new for a day or so.

hi,when i think my turtle is getting bored i give her a frozen block of blood worms,they soon defrost and end up all over the tank in all the rocks n pebbles.this keeps her busy for hours moving all the rocks looking for the worms........

I've been slowly trying to introduce new foods to Niko and so far he will eat pellets and blue berries and worms. That's all I feed him so far.

These all sound like great ideas! Thank you! Turtles eat snails? I did not know that. Is it healthy for them or way more of a treat?

I got him way more fish but he still doesn't seem very interested in them. He likes to play around the bars that come from the floating zoo med dock. I'm starting to understand turtles more and more.

I love you people and I love this website <3

Yeah, our turtles got bored of the fish when they couldnt catch them, so we had to catch the fish and hold their tales and the turtles ate them

try this,it keeps my tez busy for hours,2 hrs after fi lming this she is still looking for worms.....ha ha................http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqsYZH4ZIpE feel free to comment

Our turtles were two years when they really became interested in Fish, Niko may just be too young yet.