How much should I be feeding my turtle?

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Mount_Prion

Mount_Prion

Piranha
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Jan 31, 2012
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Right now my 4.5-5'' Reimanni Snake Neck eats 1.5x a day (every night and every other morning as well) and I generally feed him till he sort of slows down eating, and leave a little extra in the tank for bottom-feeding fish and him to pick at. His food is calcium-infused (and I usually throw in some vitachem), at least every other day.

How much do you think I should be feeding him? He doesn't really look "fat" to me, and he usually goes completely bonkers in a very non-turtle-like way when I approach the tank and he hasn't yet eaten.

I'm not sure if I'm underfeeding him. At the very least, he's ridiculously active and is definitely growing.
 
A good rule for turtles is enough food to fill their head, if it were hollow. For young turtles, this amount once a day is enough, as they get older this can be reduced to every other day.

Best,
Paul
 
paul112 said:
A good rule for turtles is enough food to fill their head, if it were hollow. For young turtles, this amount once a day is enough, as they get older this can be reduced to every other day.

Best,
Paul
Click to expand...

Snakenecks have an oddly proportioned head, though. And at his size I feel like his head would be filled up by half an earthworm. But he can easily house like 6 of them. Pretty sure if I fed him only a head full a day he'd spend all his time tearing up moss balls for food, and as I understand it this sp is highly carnivorous and don't really eat plant matter, so I take that as a sign of desperation.

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So am I actually overfeeding him? And is that as dangerous for a turtle as it is for fish? I'm usually guilty of doing it to my fish anyway.
 
Mount_Prion said:
Not sure exactly what you mean.
Click to expand...

+1

I have a res of same size, I have omega one juvenile turtle pellets, they are very healthy, I drop about 12 in 2x per day, then I throw in some veggies a couple times a week. He's growing extremely fast!



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I agree with Paul. Remember, they're not mammals so their metabolism is much slower than ours. I know it's hard to resist a turtle begging for food (I have several that do this daily and my GF always falls for it) but too much food intake can cause irregular growth such as shell pyramiding and damage to the internal organs.
 
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