water issues

Question
HI,
My turtle Paris is an aquatic turtle.  She is about 3 years old.  My question is about her water.  Her water has a film on the top of it as well as bubbles around the top edges of the water.  Do you know if that is from overfeeding possibly? We just changed the water 2 days ago.  It was fine yesterday.  We have never seen this before.  Thank you.  
Anna

Answer
It is probably a water quality issue of some sort.

Here are some possibilities:
- Small tank? The water pool size should be about 10 gallons of water per inch of turtle. At 3, she should be around 5", and so require a 50 gallon pool. Too small of a tank causes lots of problems, but it also adds to water cleanliness issues.
- Filtration. Turtles are messy and need about 2-3 times the filtration of fish. Your ideal 50 gallon pool should have filtration ranked for about 150 gallon tanks.
- Water changes. Without filtration, you need to change about 1/3rd of the water every couple days, and do a tank clean-out about weekly.
- Food. Lots of food are oily or otherwise contribute to messy water. This is not the place that should be changed, however. We should feed good, healthy food and keep the water clean in other ways.

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http://www.austinsturtlepage.com
http://www.redearslider.com