subject: Three Great Feeding Your Pet Turtle Tips For People Caring For Turtles [print this page] Feeding time when caring for turtles is an important time for both the turtle and the owner. It is a time when a turtle and their owner can bond. The turtle sees their owner as a friend who is responsible for their meals, while the owner may see it as caring for a little buddy. This should be a striaght foraward task but sometimes owners make mistakes which make feeding their pet more complicated or causes unneccessary problems. Here are a few quick tips to help turtle owners improve upon their turtle feeding habits.
1) Feed your turtle in a separate tank from their aquarium If you have an aquatic turtle it's always best to feed it in a separate tank or bowl instead of their aquarium. Turtles who are aquatic are messy eaters by trade and will leave alot of mess behind when they are tucking into a meal. By feeding a turtle in a seperate container this eliminates the chances of food particles left floating in the aquarium, which leaves the tank very dirty and affects the water freshness.
2) Supplementing the food with essential vitamins
Before you serve your turtle their food, use this time to drizzle or sprinkle some important vitamins over their salad mixture or whatever you're feeding them. Two vital vitamins you can use as dressing or dusting for their foods is:
*Calcium
*Vitamin A
Calcium can come in the form of a powder and you can obtain calcium powder from most pet stores or even online from a respectable source. All you have to do is sprinkle the calcium power over their foods and watch them gobble it up. Make sure to buy non-phosphorus calcium powder to ensure you don't unbalance your turtles calcium to phosphorus ratio.
Cod liver oil is a good source of vitamin A and can be drizzled over their vegetables before serving it to them.
3) Feed your tortoise in small amounts
One problem which comes with caring for turtles that owners have is the fact that their tortoise eats food in small amounts and often leaves their vegetables and fruits unattended for long periods of time, occasionally coming back to nibble on it later. The problem with this is if there is a large amount of food left over then it is likely to spoil. A way to solve this problem is to feed your tortoise small amounts of food throughout the day instead of one big meal. At every serving of a small meal wait for them to finsih their food completely before providing another helping. If this is impractical for you try measuring the amount of food your tortoise consumes in a day and provide them with that, so as to prevent any leftovers and food spoiling. Whatever foods are leftover at the end of the day must be removed you don't want any pest or parasites infecting it and your tortoise devouring that down.
