Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hi, I have had three of 11 of my baby commons snappers die in the last two weeks! It really has me stumped on what to do. They are being housed in a large plastic tub(5 1/2' X 2') with water about 3 inches deep in the deepest area. I have large creek gravel as the substrate (big enough so they can swallow it), the gravel makes a very gradual incline from the deep end and levels out at a water depth of 1 inch. They have flat river rocks as a basking area under a 100watt basking bulb which keeps the basking temp at 83 degrees(I think it should be warmer for commons, am I correct?). Their water temp is held at a constant 80 degrees. The only other thing in there was several aquarium plants I got at petsmart. The plants are kind of prickly and the leaves which are like little pine needles break off easily. The woman at petsmart said they were alright for turtles but I'm not sure if she knew what she was talking about.
So after the three got sick and died I removed the plants immediately! Before they died they were twisting around in the water, walking in circles on the land, and would stretch their necks way out and look over the back of their shells. One of them's eyes got puffy and had puss form around it, so I was putting turtle eye rinse on it several times a day. I have never had any of these things happen to any of my other snappers...Please let me know if you think you can help.-Thanks for reading this long post...

O by the way, I forgot to mention I have been feeding them Reptomin twice a day and tiny bits of chicken once a week.

Sounds like it could be an RI. Raise the water temp a little and raise the basking temperature.

Sorry to here about your loss. I lost one of my 18 snapper hatchlings last week.

The cause of the death was a different problem yours. But I'ld like to describe the problem so others don't make the same mistake.

We had just spent 20 minutes feeding earthworms to hoard and did not notice any problems at all.

Afterwards, I found the dead hatchling while moving about some of the plants and rocks in their pool. Suddenly the dead turtle appeared floating on the surface. He was one of our largest. I was really puzzled. They all seemed perfectly healthy and thriving.

Here's what happend. In their pool I had a 7 inch long roughly potato shaped rock. It weighed about 4 pounds. The problem was that on the down side of the rock there was a balance point across the middle of the rock. It could rock back and forth and had about 1/2 clearance on the half of the rock that was in the up position. The rock could not move on its own.

The turtle apparently tried to muscle his way under the rock and trapped himself. The further he would push under this rock, the harder the rock was pushing down on him. We had that rock with the hatchlings for 7 months. The turtles were then too small and weak to be trapped by the rock.

I feel pretty stupid, although it wasn't an obvious danger.