Really sorry to hear you lost your woods.



I don't have as much experience with woods as spotteds and boxes, but they are all very similar when it comes to swimming... and drowning.



In my spotted enclosures, the thing that I spend the most time worrying about in the design is the drowning potential. They usually swim fine... like fish... but sometimes they get to the bottom without their lungs full of air, and they sit there like stones. The only way they can get air is to walk toward the surface at the edge. If the sides are too steep, they just scramble in place until they drown. And the slope doesn't have to be too steep if it's smooth. It's amazing how terrible they are at moving up a smooth, gentle slope.



I tend to do the following:

1)Don't make the water too deep. Ideally, a foot or two is plenty. Don't try to keep these turtles in a goldfish pond. Make it a bog.

2)Keep the slopes gradual. Really gradual.

3)If you're using a liner, put sideways wrinkles in it for grip.

4)Keep plenty of submerged rocks, branches, and plants for climbing.

5)Keep hatchlings in a small setup until they are at least an inch or two. In a big outdoor enclosure, they tend to get "lost". It's hard to keep track of them, and they sometimes end up in a corner buried until they dry out. If you have a really well-planted natural enclosure, it's different. If they hatch in there, they will probably get along fine as if they are wild. Actually, my biggest problem is finding and catching all of the "wild" babies each year.

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