It sounds strange to kick off my new blog by talking about a water turtle but he’s a very important turtle – he is the inspiration for a lot of my projects!
I found Squirty, a baby eastern painted water turtle, in July of 2020 when I picking up seaweed at my grandmothers lake house. Normally we find dead fish mixed in with the seaweed and on occasion we’ll find crayfish but I’ve never found a turtle in all my years of pitchforking the stuff. Based on the winds at the time, we figured he must have floated with a patch of seaweed from the northern part of the lake. Facing a sure death if I had put him back in the lake given his size, we decided to keep him. Plus my kids were already emotionally connected to him 😉
I had two red eared sliders, Franklin and Eleanor, while I was in college so I already knew the basics of keeping water turtles. Before we left to go home, we bought a starter kit on Amazon but he had to live in a clear blue storage bin until his new setup came.
If you know me at all, you’ll know that my mantra is “you can always make something better”. A friends dad growing up would call me “Tim, the toolman”, a la the hit 90’s TV show Home Improvement. Stock power was never good enough and I wanted to find ways to make this more powerful and faster. Later in life, this would also take the form of how to make this more efficient and optimized.
When I saw the spec’s of the turtle kit my wife ordered, I was a little worried. Turtles are messy animals; they make messes when they eat by not fully eating their food, their feces typically disintegrate shortly after they’ve departed the turtles behind, and they urinate openly in the water they drink. I knew that dinky little filtration system wasn’t going to be able to handle the needs of the turtle for very long.
After we got Squirty set up in his new 30 gallon starter tank, I quickly bought a MarineLand canister filtration system to replace the low-flow filter the kit came with. This was a bit overkill but it made me feel better that his water was as clean as it could be.
I knew that I wanted to give Squirty a really cool environment after watching YouTube videos on Paludariums which are similar to aquariums in that they both hold water but a Paludarium also includes terrestrial features such as a soil bed for flowers or ground cover plants, stationary basking rock, and waterwalls. Throw in some live moss and you got yourself a pretty sweet Paludarium.
Now all I need is a bigger tank… 😉
Stocker Electronics 