Low maintenance turtles
 

Is there any turtles that are low maintenance, in terms of living with small
fish in a small pond with no problem, eat what the small fish eat (I
understand some turtles eat meat and need calcium for the shell, I don't
want to feed meat messing up the pond), small size (my new pond is 60cm x
220cm with a depth of about 40cm). I have water lillies and 5 other kind of
aquatic plants in it, going to put in about 10 small fish just to control
the mosquito (no Koi nor goldfish as they will get big and can be messy). I
hope to keep a clean pond without using a filter. I would like to keep some
small turtles if they are easy to keep. Hope there are some.

Turtles, in a natural pond, eat small fish, dead fish, plants, snails,
insects, worms.
I've kept turtles in a 3,000 gallon pond. They would share the fish
food I fed the fish. I have an island in the pond where I would toss
extra fish food and land snails that I found in the yard for the
turtles.
I kept extra floating plants in the pond for the turtles to eat
(water hyacinth) and I was not concerned about any damage they did to
the lilies (figured it was the price to pay).

I did run a filter on the pond.
Hope that helps.

kathy
www.blogfromthebog.com

On Tue, 26 Apr 2005 21:02:12 +1000, "HW" wrote:

Is there any turtles that are low maintenance, in terms of living with small
fish in a small pond with no problem, eat what the small fish eat (I
understand some turtles eat meat and need calcium for the shell, I don't
want to feed meat messing up the pond), small size (my new pond is 60cm x
220cm with a depth of about 40cm). I have water lillies and 5 other kind of
aquatic plants in it, going to put in about 10 small fish just to control
the mosquito (no Koi nor goldfish as they will get big and can be messy). I
hope to keep a clean pond without using a filter. I would like to keep some
small turtles if they are easy to keep. Hope there are some.

If you think koi & goldfish are messy, you haven't seen turtle poo. My
understanding is their output outputs koi poo times 5. ~ jan

(Do you know where your water quality is?)