Reptile & Amphibian Forums

What Kind Of Fish Can My Baby RES Eat???

I recently bought a RES. I went to my local pet store and asked them what kind of fish he could eat. They told me red mollies (or something like that.....maybe pink mollies) were the only fish safe for him. But, a friend of mine has a pond by his house with wild RES in it. He says that they eat guppies. I know that pet store info is usually wrong. I have a small 3 gallon tank with a filter for the feeder fish/shrimp. What kind of fish would be best? I would like to feed him guppies b/c I heard that they breed by themselves.

Also, I heard that he can eat bloodworms or earthworms or something like that. What other live food can he eat, and can i buy bulk in advance and freeze it? If so, how long will it last?
mudvayne_lethal_dose@hotmail.com

First off your turtle will be fine eating guppies, fed them to mine all the time. The best stuff, however, is either home bred fish, or turtle food.

Frozen food that they enjoy eating is brine shrimp. It's extremly inexpensive compared to guppies, and they love it. The reason you don't want to feed them too many store bought feeders is because in the stores tanks, they use a lot of copper to keep the algae down, and that gets absorbed into the fish, and if your turtle eats the fish, thus getting the copper in it, too much can harm your turtle. I feed mine mainly the brine shrimp and every now and then ill throw in some ghost shrimp, or guppies for a treat.

Guppies will not reproduce by themselves. If you choose to breed guppies, good freakin luck. They are a pain in the butt to breed, just search the net you'll find out plans for breeding pools. As soon as the babies are born, they must be seperated from the parents to keep them from being eaten. Talk about motherly love, huh? lol...

Bloodworms i've been told can be fed to them, however I've never fed them to mine. Try baby crickets, however they do escape easily. when they grow older, you can feed them rosie red's, goldfish, however these also have high copper levels. Mealworms are a good treat, the only problem is that you have to drop them into the water and they will eat them one at a time, because the worms will drown. (i'm saying all this presuming that your RES is a hatchling...I have 2 RES hatchlings and one 1 yr old softshell). I feed my softy crayfish, I know for softy's at least that's thought to be a large part of their diet in the wild. If you really want to, you can every now and then feed them something like cooked chicken, beef, but in very small incraments. (if you cooked too much and you're afraid that it will go bad or something.) at younger ages, RES turtles are very carniverous, but later on in life their tastes will change to red-leaf romaine, brocolli, etc. Never feed them iceburg lettuce, however. They will eat this stuff now, in small incriments. HOpe it helped. -Chris

Woah, wierd.. I accidentally bred feeder guppies to the point where they were a bit of a nuicence (nuisence? noosense?). They must be one of those things that only breed when you're not trying. Like fruit flies. The fact that it was a 75 gallon probably also helped.
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Peter: It's OK, I'll handle it. I read a book about something like this.
Brian: Are you sure it was a book? Are you sure it wasn't NOTHING?

Greetings,

I bought 4 Rosy's for my half-dollar sized RES a few weeks ago. Their still swimming. They are a little to big for my turtle. Guppies are smaller and would have probably been a better choice.

They do a nice job of eating left over food. Anyone know of other additions that might help keep the tank clean?

-Ravon

Ghost shrimp are pretty cool, if your pet store carries them. I'm sure they'd get eaten too, but they're cheap.
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Peter: It's OK, I'll handle it. I read a book about something like this.
Brian: Are you sure it was a book? Are you sure it wasn't NOTHING?