General Care Discussion :: Excessive shedding?

[kortneyerin]

I awoke this morning to my baby res tank with pieces of shed skin (I'm assuming) all over it. I've noticed this before, but never this amount. Also he had some hanging from his neck this morning (he's had it before) but when I take him out of the tank it's not visible. I can only see it under water. I took a warm cotton ball and gently rubbed his skin hoping to get it off. Is this normal? I'll post a link of some pics of it on my flickr account because, I have no idea how to post them directly on here.

Also, I want to add that I just purchased a filter two days ago. It's a Zooed Turtle Clean 501 canister filter. His tank is only ten gallons. I also just recently started conditioning his water and purchased some VitaShell (shell and skin conditioner) and rubbed it on his shell because, the top back end of his shell seems to be a little flimsy. Thanks for any help. It's greatly appreciated!

http://m.flickr.com/#/photos/100580798@ ... 986888505/

[dumbork14]

Hi. Shedding skin may be caused by warm water. How's his diet? What do you feed him?

[kortneyerin]

Hi. Shedding skin may be caused by warm water. How's his diet? What do you feed him?

Thanks for the reply! I only feed him the Zoo Med hatchling formula pellets daily and red and green lettuce a couple of times a week. The water heater set to 82 degrees. Do you think that's too warm?

[dumbork14]

That may be too warm. "Water temperature must be accurately monitored and controlled. A submersible water heater is necessary to maintain the preferred water temperature range of 78-80 degrees F for hatchlings and 75-78 degrees F for adults.". Try lowering the temp and see if the shedding stops.

[steve]

Is the filter breaking any of the water surface? It looks mostly like a protein slick.

[kortneyerin]

Is the filter breaking any of the water surface? It looks mostly like a protein slick.

Is that what that is? Protein? From what tho? Before I had the filter it was never like that. Fortunately it looks 100% better now. I bought some Fluker's Waste Remover and did a partial water change and it is working great now. I honestly though it was his skin shedding.

[kortneyerin]

That may be too warm. "Water temperature must be accurately monitored and controlled. A submersible water heater is necessary to maintain the preferred water temperature range of 78-80 degrees F for hatchlings and 75-78 degrees F for adults.". Try lowering the temp and see if the shedding stops.

Thanks! I haven't lowered the temp yet because, everything seems to have cleared up. I have to purchase a thermometer. As of now I'm only going by what the submersible heater is reading.

[steve]

We don't normally recommend additives like a waste remover. Try having the filter break the water surface, it doesn't need to be much.

[pblh2o]

So I inherited a 3yr old RES from my daughter recently and it has begun to shed its skin. It has the same filter and heater she used. She would only feed it 4 Reptomin pellets each night and when I did that it seemed to want more and would be almost jumping out of the water before each feeding. I read that you could feed it the same amount as the size of its head so I slowly increased the feed to about 8-10 pellets and now the turtles skin is shedding. It seems to be pretty excessive. Should I cut back on the amount of feed and if so should I start feeding it other things like veggies? Maybe alternate veggies and pellets every other day? And what about this "size of the head" thing. It has a pretty big head.

[ljapa]

The recommendation is the size of the head daily up to one year and then the size of the head every other day after that, interspersed with vegetables.

So, for a 3 year old, it would be vegetables, then pellets equally the size of the head the next day followed by vegetables. See here

http://www.redearslider.com/plants.html

for a guide on plant matter.

I'll confess that I don't follow that with my 1.5 year old. I do about 1/3 the size of her head daily plus vegies. So, she gets protein equaling her head over a 3 day period and vegies daily.

I'd say cut back a bit and introduce plant matter to the diet. If your turtle doesn't seem to take to plants, check out the turtle jello shots:

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