Mikey, Our Red Eared Slider

Back in March, Anita and I picked up two little turtles from a local aquarium shop, something we had wanted to add to our aquarium set-up for a while but never managed to in Sydney. Licensing laws are stricter in Australia because of the need to protect local species, and a license is needed to have reptiles as pets, plus, our local aquarium store in Cremorne were unable to source any for us, we didn’t press the issue much either.

So after about 6 weeks in Singapore we decided to get a couple of turtles, named them Mikey and Toby, a small tank as well as a few guppies. We didn’t get off to the best start, the guppies didn’t survive more than a few days and one of our turtles had a disease which meant he was unable to swim. Poor Toby was only able to skim across the top of the water, apparently it’s a common disease and he didn’t make it longer than about 6 weeks, eventually he was just too weak, he was a little fighter though and he’ll always be remembered.

As time went on, the lone survivor Mikey was getting bigger and bigger by the week, so the tank went from being half full, to full in a matter of short weeks. We got a little creative and made him a basking area complete with bamboo ladder, artificial grass, and a palm tree. The idea being that if he ever got sick of swimming he had somewhere to go and warm up and soak in the rays.

Time went on, and a month or so ago Anita and I decided that he had outgrown his first home and it was time to splash out on that well earned upgrade, he ended up with a 60 litre tank, complete with a new high powered waterfall filter (turtles are pretty messy little animals), tank ornaments and a water oxygenator. We kept his old basking area as well and that’s going to be the next upgrade.

So, here we are in July, Mikey has some new fishy friends (Tetra’s added to the tank over the weekend) to chase around and he’s happy as Larry. We took some photos of him a couple of weeks ago so we thought that we should share then here.

I hope you enjoy the pics as much as we enjoyed taking them. Check out the slideshow below, or view them on Flickr.