White spots are not evident on your pictures. If you manually peel off the loose scutes, this may cause damage and "white spots" on a young slider. More likely, these may be due to calcium (hard water) effusion under unshed scutes (see this all the time). Are you in a hard water area?
RE your sandfish: keep an area of your tank at over 100 degrees F by using an overhead incandescent light with a reflector. Use the "Calci-sand" (high calcium sand available in other brands at your pet super store). My Arabian sandfish (A different species) have done well for 8 years under these conditions. I feed a simple diet of crickets and mealworms. These are totally delightful creatures and soon learn to "beg' for food when you enter the room.

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• calcium deficency? white spots on shell - eatinmachine, Sun Nov 6 19:56:46 2005
• RE: calcium deficency? white spots on shell - honuman, Wed Nov 9 15:53:12 2005
• I don't want to be told that as this thread would be 50 long... - eatinmachine, Thu Nov 10 16:22:53 2005
• RE: calcium deficency? white spots on shell - erico, Wed Nov 16 14:44:38 2005
• RE: calcium deficency? white spots on shell - eatinmachine, Wed Nov 16 20:11:50 2005