Caring For Turtles: Three Great Tips For Making Feeding Your Pet Turtle A lot Easier

When caring for turtles, feeding time for your pet turtle is one of the moments when you and your turtle come into contact and there is almost a mutual understanding of exactly what is happening. Your turtle acknowledges that you are a friend with food and willingly comes over to take bites out of the meal you provide it. Even though this should be a straight forward task, there are a few mistakes turtles owners (particularly first time owners) make and it sometimes can cause more trouble than the good intended. Here are a few tips to make turtle feeding easier for you and your turtle:

1) Feed your turtle in a separate tank from their aquarium If you have an aquatic turtle it's always best to feed it in a separate tank or bowl instead of their aquarium. Aquatic turtles in particular are very messy eaters and tend to leave quite a bit of mess behind when it comes to dinner time. Feeding your turtle in a separate tank prevents bits of their food remaining in the aquarium, leaving the tank dirty and ruining the freshness of the water.

2) Supplementing the food with essential vitamins

Before you serve your turtle their food, use this time to drizzle or sprinkle some important vitamins over their salad mixture or whatever you're feeding them. Two vital vitamins you can use as dressing or dusting for their foods is:

*Calcium

*Vitamin A

Calcium can come in the form of a powder and you can obtain calcium powder from most pet stores or even online from a respectable source. All you have to do is sprinkle the calcium power over their foods and watch them gobble it up. Keep in mind that you'll want to buy phosphorus free calcium to prevent unbalancing your turtle's calcium to phosphorus ratio.

Cod liver oil is a great source of vitamin A and it's just a simple case of drizzling some cod liver oil over their salad mixture before giving it to them.

3) Feed your tortoise in small amounts

One problem which comes with caring for turtles that owners have is the fact that their tortoise eats food in small amounts and often leaves their vegetables and fruits unattended for long periods of time, occasionally coming back to nibble on it later. The problem with this is if there is a large amount of food left over then it is likely to spoil. A way to solve this problem is to feed your tortoise small amounts of food throughout the day instead of one big meal. When it comes to every serving of a small meal make sure they finish the meal completely before providing more. If this is impractical for you try measuring the amount of food your tortoise consumes in a day and provide them with that, so as to prevent any leftovers and food spoiling. Whatever foods are leftover at the end of the day must be removed you don't want any pest or parasites infecting it and your tortoise devouring that down.

I hope these tips have been useful to you and you've learnt new ways to make feeding time more enjoyable for you and your turtle. For more feeding tips on feeding turtles and foods that are good for turtle health visit http://www.squidoo.com/feedingturtles