We found a non-indigenous red-eared slider turtle. We let WildArc/SPCA know about the turtle and they told us not to release it back into the wild, as it's an invasive species. We decided to make a habitat for it and our two Asian box turtles. You can see our turtle's outdoor terrarium at the beginning of the video. The new indoor habitat is made of 5/8th inch high-density paper laminated douglas fir plywood, which I got as scrap when I worked in the sign industry. The habitat is lined with rubber pond liners. It has a swimming area with a shallow and a deep end, and a land area with sand, sphagnum moss, and some rocks, some that we ran through our rock polisher. The swimming area has about 125 litres of water (33 US gallons, or 27.5 Imperial gallons). They have a heat lamp over one of the larger rocks. It's wonderful that they are all getting along.he red-eared slider was found on a very hot day a long way from water on Panama Flats, in Saanich (Victoria), Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada.https://www.google.com/maps/@48.4739005,-123.4016546,33m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=yt We got the Asian box turtles in the June of 1990, so they are more than 32 years old. We're not sure how old they were when we got them, but their shells were about 10 centimetres (4 inches) in diameter when we got them.The Asian box turtles were named after characters in science fiction writer John Varley's Titan trilogy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaea_trilogy)The female is named Calvin and the male is named Rocky. There are two characters nicknamed Rocky in the Titan books: A female character named Cirroco Jones and a male character named Phase Shifter Double-Sharped Lydian Trio Rock 'N Roll. We thought Calvin and Rocky were both males at first, but then Calvin laid some eggs. We've named the red-eared slider August, as we don't know the turtle's sex and August isn't usually a gender-specific name (August in the Titan series is a woman with 4 identical quintuplet sisters). We also thought August was an appropriate name as we found the slider in August (2022). We used to have a dog Gabby, named after Gaby Plauget from Titan.Turtles are escape artists, which seems funny for a creature with a hard shell. We worked to make the habitat hard for them to get out of for their safety. Hopefully, if they want to escape they'll try to push through the window rather than figure out an ingenious way to get over the walls.
Red-eared sliders are native to the mid-western United States and northern Mexico, not Canada, and definitely not here on Vancouver Island. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red-eared_slider
sian box turtles are from China, India, Bhutan, Indonesia, and the Phillippines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_box_turtle We aren't sure of the specific species of Asian box turtles we have, but they are one of the semi-aquatic types. We think they may be Domed Malayan Box Turtles (Cuora amboinensis kamaroma) a sub-species of Amboina box turtle.
Filmed with 2 I-Pads and a Nikon Coolpix waterproof, while some of the still images were taken with a Canon EOS 70D
Comments
(Old Spike)
epic