Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Ok so the vet can't get the tank I need, but the one that she could get measured 36x18x19 which is too tall would run $62.00.

I have found a 40g breeder that's 36x18x16 & that lower height is even more attractive to me because it's a full 2 inches shorter than the top of the stand. I think it'd be easier for me to clean if it's not crammed tightly into the stand.
It's $110.00 a little more than I wanted to pay but the one I found online made of acrylic is $80.00 plus shipping which would be oversized so it'd probably cost another 80 or more just to ship it.

I would have to travel to another town to get this tank for 110.00 but I wouldn't have to pay for shipping. I wouldn't mind traveling it's not that far away & would give a us a good excuse to go on a day trip just for the heck of it. lol
Do you think $110.00 is a decent price?
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PHRatz

Hard to say.
I read the post below about the new aquarium store. Is it possible that they could order just the right tank for you? I don't know if I would settle for the acrylic tank though. I know that the older types are prone to scratching, although it is possible that the newer ones are better.
As for the $110.00 being fair....well, I guess it depends on where you are. Fortunately for us, we live in south Florida where there are several large aquarium manufacturers. Prices here can be very cheap compared to other regions.

One thing that bears repeating...if you do go with a tank that is wider than the stand, be sure to put HEAVY plywood under it to spread the weight. With a 40 gallon aquarium you can get away with that but with larger tanks you can't.

Ok I have finished calling every store in the phone book for this town & the town that's 20 miles away. Not one of them has a clue about what I am looking for.
I told them I need a 40g breeder then I gave them the dimensions & told them that on the height I could do anywhere from 12-18 inches. Nobody no gotty.
Nobody has the size I need listed in their order books much less on the shelves.
I guess if I want this I'm going to have to go with the high dollar one which actually my DH isn't unhappy about because he wants to make that day trip lol.
I never would've imagined it would be this difficult!
Sheesh.

btw the stand is 18 inches wide on the bottom & already has plywood under the tank that Scooter is in now..just to be safe.
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PHRatz

Where on Earth do you live anyway? I mean, the general area..

>>Where on Earth do you live anyway? I mean, the general area..

YES! Frustrating is the word for this!
I'm in West TX, in the desert. Apparently desert people don't know much about fish aquariums? I don't know.

We don't gauge in-state trips by miles, it's easier to do it by hours. It's a 7-8 hour drive to the DFW area, 6 hours to Austin, 5 to San Antonio, 10-11 to Houston, 7-8 hours to El Paso so....

It'd cost way more than it's worth to try to find a tank in one of these larger cities. It'd cost less money for us to drive the 110 miles to get this one that costs $110.00. That's max only a 2 hour drive, that'd make it 50 cents per mile on the price of the tank for a 220 mile round trip.
Frustrating but we like to go on day trips now & then just for the heck of it. We drove 2 & 1/2 hours in Oct. just to buy lawn statues to attach to our gate columns. We can find lawn statues here but here we don't see the weenie dog, the turtle, rattlesnake & roadrunner statues that we bought.
Here's the turtle one:

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PHRatz

West Texas takes forever to drive through. We found that out when we drove from Palm Beach County Florida all the way to Tucson, Arizona years ago. I thought I would die of old age on the I-10.
The gate statues are great.

>>West Texas takes forever to drive through. We found that out when we drove from Palm Beach County Florida all the way to Tucson, Arizona years ago. I thought I would die of old age on the I-10.
>>

Thankfully we're about 100 miles north of I-10, I've only been down that way going west 2-3 times, it is desolate around there.
We aren't in Hooterville but apparently pet store people just don't understand the concept of breeder tanks for turtles.

I have to ask you about your trip.
Did you have any odd experience driving through NM?
We were there once driving toward home from Santa Fe, & decided to take a more "scenic route" & go through Rui Doso. This was before we knew that NM is designated as an open range state.
We're driving along when suddenly the highway vanished on us & we were in the middle of a herd of cattle wondering what the heck is going on around here. lol
Looked at the map, it showed we were going the right way even though we were sliding around on damp sand & didn't even see a road, then 27 miles later we found pavement.
We were very happy to get back to TX where at least we know the roads don't just vanish into thin air. lol
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PHRatz

Nope, nothing weird on the trip as we stayed on I-10 the entire way. I had wanted to stop at numerous places to look for yellow mud turtles and then Sonoran mud turtles on that trip but we never did. Found many snakes and saw some very nice wildlife though.
Also, we pigged out on some fantastic Mexican food in Tucson.

I never get to stop & look at any wildlife when we travel. That has to do with the fact that it takes so long to get anywhere we just don't feel like stopping for fun, there's just never enough time. Unfortunately most of what I see is roadkill.

Although about 25 years ago on I-20 we saw a migration of some sort of large turtle.. back then I didn't know what they were, to this day I still can't find them in a field guide..but then all these years later I can't remember exactly what they looked like either. Based on the size I'm thinking they may have been cooters.

Yellow mud turtles are native to this area but they are so secretive that you just don't see them.
You should see people's reactions when they see my Scooter, nobody who sees him for the first time is ever aware that he is native. I got him as a hatchling, he'd been caught by someone who gave him to me, I would've released him but I didn't know where he came from & didn't want to just toss him out around my house where there isn't any water. He's been here 10 years now, he's been a wonderful pet.

People around here always think of box turtles as "regular turtles" or they think they're snapping turtles & that they are the only turtles that live here. People don't realize that there actually is more than one species native to the area.
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PHRatz

The migrating turtles were almost certainly a cooter or slider leaving a drying pond or lake.
As for folks not realizing that they have turtles living near them I can relate to that too. I once found a promising bog in Virginia that I just knew had bog turtles in it. I asked the owner if I could walk around in his cow pasture and look for them. He said sure but he had lived there for thirty years and never seen a turtle before.
I found two bog turtles in a half an hour! On my next trip I found five in one hour. But the owner had never seen one in thirty years.

>> As for folks not realizing that they have turtles living near them I can relate to that too. I once found a promising bog in Virginia that I just knew had bog turtles in it. I asked the owner if I could walk around in his cow pasture and look for them. He said sure but he had lived there for thirty years and never seen a turtle before.
>>I found two bog turtles in a half an hour! On my next trip I found five in one hour. But the owner had never seen one in thirty years.

OMG!! BOG turtles! How cool that must've been for you to see those!
I think a lot of people simply do not notice what is going on around them. I don't know if it's because they're too busy to notice, they don't care, or what. I always notice the wildlife around me, reptilian or not.
A former neighbor kept bird feeders out in her yard. One day as we spoke for a minute I heard a grackle making one of their sounds, the sound I like to hear, I mentioned something about that, she didn't have any idea what I was talking about.
I thought how odd, you feed the birds yet you don't notice them?
If they don't even know what birds they are feeding, they aren't going to know what reptiles are around them.

On the migrating ones we saw, I got to thinking about that after I mentioned it, so I looked in the field guide & found that the Texas river cooter does live in the region we were passing through. I'll bet that's what they were.
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PHRatz

Yep, finding a previously unknown pasture that turned out to be loaded with bog turtles was very cool. I found at least one on every trip I ever made there except for one in September when it was hot and the vegetation was neck high. But in May and June they were easy to find in the morning. Nice little turtles.
I am also convinced that bog turtles are WAY MORE COMMON than 'researchers' make them out to be. The problem in finding them is that most of the really ideal habitat is located on private property and you simply can't go trespassing into every wet cow pasture to look for them.
But just as an example, a good friend stays at a bed and breakfast every spring in Virginia. On the road to the place he would always tell me how perfect it looked for bog turtles. One day he just decided to stop at a particularly good looking place and walk around. He found a beautiful bog turtle right away.

I hope that's true, that there are a whole lot more than researchers think there are.
If a man who owns land with a pond hasn't seen one in 30 years, there's no telling how many more are out there going unnoticed by other land owners.
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PHRatz

One reason that bog turtles go unnoticed is because they are a very small turtle that hides in sphagnum moss, sedges and mud for the vast majority of their lives. They are hard to find even when you know they are there and the time of year is right. That farmer was dumbstruck when I held up an adult male boggie after only 20 minutes of searching. But then, he had never had any reason to go slogging through the wet portions of his cow pasture either.
I am absolutely certain that there are countless small plots of land like that with colonies of bog turtles in them.

>>One reason that bog turtles go unnoticed is because they are a very small turtle that hides in sphagnum moss, sedges and mud for the vast majority of their lives. They are hard to find even when you know they are there and the time of year is right. That farmer was dumbstruck when I held up an adult male boggie after only 20 minutes of searching. But then, he had never had any reason to go slogging through the wet portions of his cow pasture either.
>>I am absolutely certain that there are countless small plots of land like that with colonies of bog turtles in them.

Good I hope there are huge numbers of them in small plots of land that are going unnoticed.
That's probably exactly why people here don't know that yellow mud turtles are native here because they're small & hiding in the mud, moss, & whatever they can find to hide in.

My DH tells me that there are lots of muds living in a pond on the public golf course. That's the only place I know of where there are any to be found. I've heard that there are lots of cattle stock tanks & cattle ponds south of town but those would all be on private land. Other than those areas, there isn't any water around here.
Because it's not illegal here to collect turtles from the wild I'm glad that people don't know about the muds. They take too many boxes from the wild, if they saw the muds they'd be taking them too.
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PHRatz