Red-Eared Slider
The most kept turtle in the world, and it reaches a foot across with thirty years behind it. It needs a basking spot dry enough to warm right through.
Photo by cultivar413, CC BY 2.0
Overview
The red-eared slider is a freshwater turtle native to the southeastern and central United States and northern Mexico, and it is the most widely kept and most widely released turtle in the world. Males average 17.78 cm of shell and females 25.4 cm, so a female is a dinner plate rather than the coin sized animal usually sold.
It has been introduced across Africa, Europe, Asia and Australia, where it competes with native turtles. Almost all of that came from the pet trade.
Temperament
Bold, greedy and entirely uninterested in affection. Sliders learn who feeds them and beg convincingly, which reads as tameness and is really appetite.
They bask heavily, holding body temperatures between roughly 18 and 34 C, and a slider that stops basking is usually a slider that is unwell. They are not handling animals: they are strong, they scratch, and they bite when they decide something is food.
Care and grooming
Juveniles are mostly carnivorous and adults shift to eating mainly aquatic plants while still taking invertebrates. A captive diet follows that: more protein when young, more greens as an adult, with a quality pellet as the base.
Water quality is the main work, because a turtle produces far more waste than a fish of the same size. Filtration is oversized, water changes are regular, and the water sits at 75 to 80 F with a dry basking spot at 90 F under UVB.
Living and exercise
Ten gallons of water for every inch of shell, which for an adult female means a stock tank or a pond rather than an aquarium. A dry, warm, well lit basking platform is not optional.
Selling turtles under four inches has been banned in the United States since 1975, because small turtles were a major route for Salmonella into households with children, and the ban is credited with preventing about 100,000 childhood infections a year. Reptiles carry Salmonella even when they look healthy, and the CDC recommends households with children under five do not keep turtles or other reptiles.
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