Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I am getting ready to receive my new leucistic alligator snapper in a couple days. His tank is ready but the wood I put in there has put a ton of tannin in the water. It looks like a big tank of strong iced tea. It's so dark it will be hard to see the turtle. While I am pretty sure this won't bother him much I wonder if it will dye his skin since he is a leucistic. Does anyone have any experience with this? Would water clarifiers work?

Thanks

Yes your right,it will turn his skin a darker color. It happened to my pinkskin.Now I use large rocks that he can climb on to get air but that wont fall on him. Steve

Did he get back to his original color when you got the wood out of the water?

Put up a picture when you get the new guy.
Like to see it

Mike

There are three things you can do: 1 you can just put something else in the water "rocks" just make sure that the structure wont fall and pin your turtle down. They still need oxygen to breath and cant get that with rocks on top of them. 2 take your log/wood and back it in the oven for 2-2.5 hours in the oven at 300* that will completely dry the wood out but you might need to do it for more time to stop it from tanning the water. 3 Boil the tanning out of the wood this will take multible boils but is the best solution on getting it out. The down side to boiling it is that it makes the wood very tender and it will decay a lot faster. Hope this helps you out. I have done both but Boiling it seem to work great. Good luck and dont forget to post a pic of the setup when its all done. Stittingham

There are three things you can do: 1 you can just put something else in the water "rocks" just make sure that the structure wont fall and pin your turtle down. They still need oxygen to breath and cant get that with rocks on top of them. 2 take your log/wood and back it in the oven for 2-2.5 hours in the oven at 300* that will completely dry the wood out but you might need to do it for more time to stop it from tanning the water. 3 Boil the tanning out of the wood this will take multible boils but is the best solution on getting it out. The down side to boiling it is that it makes the wood very tender and it will decay a lot faster. Hope this helps you out. I have done both but Boiling it seem to work great. Good luck and dont forget to post a pic of the setup when its all done. Stittingham