My Fiance works at a pet store p/t at our local mall. Yeah those places are really crappy, but she is very much into animals and she actually got our dog there too.(Side effect of working at a pet store)....Anyways, they had a Red Eared Slider there that no one really seemed to care for, and its tank was absolutley the worst for a turtle...(ie no UVB light for basking and such.) Over time with poor lighting and horrid diet the turtle started to develop a strange fungus of some sort on its shell. It looks like it is a white fungus but now it has algae growing on it. His shell seems to be soft in some places of the fungus, but not on others. My fiance took a initiative there one day and set up a better tank envioronment(to the best of her abitility) at the store which seemed to have made the turtle a little happier. He still wasnt getting the proper care he needed so I asked my fiance if she was down with the idea of seeing if we could get a good deal on buying the whole setup from the store and takign care of the turlte ourselves. We did. $80 for the store's setup of the tank. I have everything setup at her place now and I have been reading as much as I can about taking care of this turtle. I named him King Koopa.
I have purchased around $200 worth of supplies for him to help him get better.
The turtle is in a 25 gallon tank now and he is rougly 5 inches. The tank is about half full of water and there is a turtle dock in there under a basking light. The turtle dock was too small for him so I purchased a bigger one. The filter that is in it is not very good or rated for turtles so I purchased a submergable filter that is rated for 30 gallons(read somewhere to get filters that are double the size of the amount of water in the tank). The light I have is not a UVB basking light. So I purchased a UVA/UVB basking light.
For his shell I:
Give him warm salt water baths for 30 minutes once a day.
Have him on a strict diet(based on a diet I saw on a website of info I found).
Give Calcium suppliments 2 times a week.
Try to provide the proper temperatures of the water, basking area, and the rest of the tank.
Purchased a proper basking light.
Medicated Sulfa Blocks
I am doing the best I can here, but I am having a problem. He doesnt like eating anything other then Turtle Pellets and Goldfish. I need to get him to eat more veggies and fruits. I try putting small pieces of floating lettuce, spinach, cantelope, tomatoes.....but he doesnt seem to like them. I have tried putting some pellets and some spinach in the feeding tank with him, hoping he will eat some spinach with the pellets and like it....but he lets go of the spinach if he gets some in his mouth. I don't know what to do. I dont know of any vets in the area that will look at a turtle. He doesn't seem to be in any pain.
What can I do?
