Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I am thinking about breeding box turtles. How many males and how many females do i need. About how big of an inclosure am i going to need? If some of the turtles were to successfully breed how would i tell if the female was gravid or not?

crocker

for what purpose would you breed them?

I can tell you straight out that you will NEVER make a profit breeding box turtles. Quite the opposite. Setting up large outdoor pens and maintaining them while feeding your animals alone will far exceed the meager 30-40 dollars a hatchling can sell for. Vet bills for one visit to handle a small problem will blow out any income from them alone each year. It is definitely a labour of love.

If your only purpose for keeping adults is to produce offspring, then I would avoid box turtles all together. They breed extremely slowly, and only after they are comfortable in healthy surroundings. They also can go off years and their viable clutches do not have a particularly high hatch rate, even when perfectly incubated, when compared to many other species. My average over years with each female is probably one hatchling a year if I am lucky (this is over years, some years I can get 3 or 4 hatchlings from one female, other years none, most years only one or two)

If you just want to breed them for the enjoyment of keeping the adults and having the offspring as a benefit, there's plenty of good advice to give.

For male/female ratio, you will need to consider it by species. Male easterns are much more likely to battle violently and cause serious injury or death to each other. Three-toes will often scrape with each other (the males) but rarely for long or as violently.

having more than one male of EITHER of these species means being able to build a whole new pen and separate them if necessary.

Mixing females is best done at a two to one ratio. That is, you should have two girls for every boy. An amorous male can easily pester and stress one female.

House them outdoors in a climate suitable to their natural range (if you live in the natural range of a species, it would be best to pick that one). Choose an area of your yard you can dedicate a large space to, and plan an extensive pen. After a large suitable outdoor habitat is built, these guys are pretty easy to keep and enjoy as pets, and the trickle of offspring is a nice additional reward and extremely exciting.