Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I was looking for some advice of info on hibernating spotted tutrtles. I have hibernated my original male and female in a small pond outside about 7 years ago. Since then they have not been hibernated and have resided in my basement over winters. Now after 22 spotteds later and three gernations of spotteds I have no room to house them during winter. I was looking to hibernate them in a non heated garage in a galvanized hrose trough. I would put six inches of muck or so on bottom. My question is since it is above ground it could still freeze solid. Any suggetsions?

I hibernate mine in one of those 175-gallon black plastic tanks that you can get from a farm-supply store (it is where they live during the year, too). I use a pond-sized filter/pump in the bottom and leave them out in the backyard (I live in western New York). I also have a 30-watt submerged aquarium heater in there (but I leave it off at the start), and a regular aquarium air pump with an air stone on the end of a length of SILICONE tubing (that's important). The pond pump stays on all the time and generates enough heat that, even though the water stays very cold (down in the 30’s), it almost never freezes completely over. If it gets cold enough to completely cover the surface of the water with ice, I manually turn on the aquarium heater (turned down to its lowest setting) until the ice on top thaws out a little. When it has been on long enough (a few hours, or a day, or a few days... depending on how cold it is outside), I turn it off until I need it again. The air pump stays on all the time because a hibernating turtle breathes under water through its cloaca and the water has to have plenty of oxygen in it. The air stone has to be on SILICONE tubing (sort of a blue-green in color and a little hard to find) because it is the only common plastic tubing that will stay flexible in cold weather. The more common vinyl tubing (clear colorless) gets very stiff and hard to handle in the cold. Also, keep the heater always under water and away from the sleeping turtles. Even submerged, it gets very hot when it's on for hours at a time and could burn them. And make sure that it doesn't get frozen into the ice, which could crack it. The bottom of the tank I let get covered with a few inches of leaves as they fall into the tank in autumn. The turtles will bury themselves as much as they want to. I have used this setup to hibernate my turtles outside for years now, and it has always worked well.