Narrator: Taronga Zoo keeper

As turtles grow just like all reptiles, they do shed their skin and their shell but they never shed their shell as one big piece, so they never lose the shell and grow a new one. Their shell grows with them and the scutes, which is the outside part of a shell or the carapace as we call it, they will slowly lift off.

So, as the turtle gets bigger they just stay small and slowly just peel off. So, if you have a turtle out of the water for quite a while and he dries out you may notice flaking on the shell. You maybe noticing the scutes lifting off and that’s just the turtle growing and just peeling like our skin. And it’s best never to peel them off because you can damage the scute underneath. So, if you notice it just let the turtle do his thing.

And a very common thing that we see with our turtles is that when they’re swimming around and you may see like a spider webbing or slime coming off their legs and it normally happens in the first few months of getting him or her and our alarm bells ring, we get a bit worried thinking our turtle’s got a fungus growing on it. And what it is turtles do shed their skin as well.

So, it will slowly just slough off their legs but it can look a little bit like a fungus or a bit of a slime coming off them, so there’s no need to panic, it’s just your turtle growing. And normally when you get the turtle for the first time, probably within a month you’re going to feed it a lot more than it was previously getting at its existing house and it will just start to grow and it will start to shed.

You’ll notice the shell starts getting marks on top as well and it’s just his shell growing, so it’s nothing to be alarmed about. Some of the main things that also we do need to worry about is if our shell does get soft then we do need to make sure that he’s getting the right amount of calcium in his food. So, we want to give him whole bodied items.

So, when we feed him things like prawns and fish we don’t shell the prawn, we leave the shells on the prawn, we just remove the head so it doesn’t spike them. And you should have happy days. If we feed them things like crickets we dust the crickets with the calcium powder just so that the turtles can get extra calcium in their diet and that will help keep their shells nice and firm.

Another common thing that can happen to your turtle is they can get respiratory problems which will need vet interaction. And sometimes you might notice your turtle just floating listlessly around the top of the tank and that can because especially in the Winter months if your heater breaks, you’re not checking your water temperature regularly, your basking lamps have stopped working and you haven’t got around to changing them that can lead to your animal getting some respiratory problem. And especially if the water’s really cold and we keep feeding them they can get upset stomachs and the food can rot in their belly.

So, it’s important to keep an eye on as a daily check, water temperature and check your lights just to ensure that the basics are working fine for our animal. I always recommend that if you’re not sure about what’s happening with your turtle, get a vet to check it.

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Narrator: Toronga Zoo keeper

So, now we’re going to handle our turtle. There are times when you do need to handle them. They’re not an animal that we handle a lot like other reptiles, we like to put snakes on us. Turtles tend to be happier when they’re in the water.

So, we are going to need to handle them at times for a vet check or we just might want to see how they’re going, feel their shells or we might need to clean the tank because we’ve fed too much and our filter just can’t do the job. So, probably the easiest way to get them is just by gently coming in, grabbing behind them. And when I grab these little guys I have two fingers on the bottom and I put one finger on top. I’m holding them with just enough force for him to sit in my hand. I’m not squeezing.

We have to be careful because if you’re not checking your turtle regularly and we grab it, they could have a soft shell so we could squash them. So, just by holding them back like that, bringing them forward.

I always like to keep my other hand underneath as well just in case he jumps out of my hand. So, sometimes they grow long nails and it’s not uncommon for them to scratch you and you can drop them because they get you unaware, they scratch and you let go. The bigger the turtle is there’s more chance they’ll try and kick off.

You can see now he’s trying to … they try to flick you away with their little legs. And they are quite strong. So, I always use two hands. And if I am handling them and I have other people having a look I tend to make everyone sit down on the ground and keep the turtle quite low to the ground because even though they do have a hard shell if they do fall and hit the ground it can crack them and that becomes a whole another issue we have to get the vets to check them. So, that’s just one thing. And turtles are not slow.

Unlike the hare and the tortoise story that we always refer to turtles being slow, turtles are not slow, they can move quite quickly and can move quite unpredictably. So, if when in doubt, two hands just to be safe. And then if you want to stick him back in you just put your hand in and just let him swim off. They’re quite happy to just go about their business. In when handling them you handle them a bit rough, these Long-necked Turtles can emit a musky odour.

So, they’ll get a bit stressed and they’ll squirt a really smelly liquid on your hands and that’s to help save them in the wild if say a dog or an animal grabbed them, they’d emit this musk and it stinks and you drop them. So, just to be aware that if you’re rough handling your turtle or you don’t handle them a lot, it’s not uncommon for them to musk you and it can be quite smelly and your hands smell. So, if you ever see a turtle run across the road and you pick him up, he’s going to get you.

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Narrator: Taronga Zoo keeper

A lot of people often want to know how old or how big should my turtle be before it can start laying eggs? So, just to give you an idea this turtle’s around two years old. You can see how big it is on the palm of my hand, a female turtle she’s usually ready to lay eggs around the seven to eight years old mark and she would be then around the palm of my hand size. So, that’s a lot of growing to do.

Now, when they do breed they actually mate in the water. And turtles tend to mate in the cooler months in preparation for the oncoming Spring to lay their eggs. So, they mate in the water and then after about three to four months the female or the girl turtle will grow her eggs inside her. She can lay anywhere between eight to sixteen eggs in the Springtime and she’ll climb up out of the water, she’ll dig a hole in a sandy area in the pond area and she’ll drop her eggs into like a pear-shaped hole in the ground and then she’ll cover them back over and she’ll have nothing to do with them, she’ll go off and leave them.

So, the eggs take roughly around sixty five days to hatch. They can take a bit longer if they’re left in the ground. If you bring them inside and you put them into an incubator to hatch them artificially then you can get sixty five days, sometimes you get a little bit shorter. Sometimes they can take a little bit longer but on average it’s about sixty five days and then we end up with some baby turtles.

You may find too because we’re keeping these turtles inside aquariums or fish tanks, terrariums or whatever you like to call them, you may find that your girl turtles probably won’t be happy laying her eggs in here or she probably won’t have a suitable site for the eggs to develop. So, most times when you keep a turtle in a tank like this, she’ll lay them in the water. So, by the time you find them which is usually the next day in because she’ll probably lay them that night the eggs will have drowned in the water. So, they’re going to be no good, there’s no point trying to incubate them.

Also, some of us don’t have the facilities to grow baby turtles or we don’t have places to put the baby turtles. So, at times to be smart we just don’t let the eggs go the full distance to incubate. We destroy the eggs once we notice them we can put them into the freezer, they don’t develop and we don’t have to worry about what to do with the offspring because the responsibility for us looking after these animals is we want to make sure that our animals that we keep are doing great.

We don’t want to bring animals into the World that we don’t have time for or the facilities to look after. So, sometimes doing the right thing is not letting our eggs incubate. And in a classroom situation you find it very difficult to get the animals to breed properly like they would outside in a pond or in the river where they come from.

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Narrator: Toronga Zoo keeper

One of the most commonly asked questions we do get asked is ‘What sex is my turtle?’ ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ ‘Do I give it a boy’s name or do I give it a girl’s name?’

Long-necked Turtles it’s really hard to tell the sexes when they’re small. If you turn them over and we have a look at this part of the shell here, if the bottom part of the shell near their tail is a v-shape, it’s usually a male. If it’s shaped as a ‘u’, it’s normally a female. So, the tail can be a little bit wider to allow eggs to come out when she’s older. But at this age it’s really hard to tell because the turtles are still growing and a ‘v’ could turn into a ‘u’. Also, males tend to have a longer tail. But in this particular species of turtle, they’re very similar in size, so it is really hard to tell. And normally you wouldn’t be able to tell the sex of one of these guys till they’re at least six to seven years old confidently.

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