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Originally Posted by MicroZooKits
Great looking turtle! I'd highly advise getting some "biological waste reducer" if you plan to keep him indoors. Hagen makes "Turtle Clean" and Exo Terra (also hagen's company LOL) Makes "Biotize". Helps breakdown "turtle grime" as I call it and greatly reduces tank odor. A clean turtle tank is a happy turtle tank  I've been keeping pet turtles indoors for a few years now as my main livingroom display so i've been through about every trial and error situation possible trying to find the best way to do it as cleanly and efficiently as possible. I think i've got it down pretty good now so if you have any questions about housing or care feel free to ask! All my answers are from pure experience. |
Biological waste reducers aren't worth the money for the majority of turtles in the majority of turtle enclosures.
First and foremost, the intention of the product and broad contents are identical to products sold for aquarium use... slap a turtle on the bottle and the price triples by volume though.
Secondly, what these products add to the enclosure are bacteria which contribute to the nitrogen cycle. The animal you're keeping produces waste, the chemically toxic (and foul smelling) element of which is ammonia, the bacteria consume the ammonia and produce nitrites, additional bacteria consume the nitrites and produce nitrates. Plants and photosynthetic bacteria utilize the nitrates in a natural environment. While each step in the nitrogen cycle produces something that is less toxic than the one before it, ammonia, nitrites and nitrates are all going to be detrimental to the health of the turtle when present in sufficient concentrations.
In an aquarium containing appropriately sized fish, the mass of the animals and amount of waste they produce is fairly low, relative to the volume of the water. It's a legitimate time saver to encourage the development of a healthy biological filter bed. In an enclosure containing a turtle, the mass of the animal and the amount of waste it produces is extremely high relative to the volume of water. Frequent and signifigant water changes are necessary regardless as the nitrates will reach harmful levels in short order and the inclusion of a biological filter bed contributes very little to an appropriate maintenence routine. This is compounded by the damage done to the biological filter bed everytime a signifigant volume of water is removed from the system or when the surfaces which the bacteria thrive on are rotated away from the flow of water. For an aquarium, these products are generally used a few times and the system supports itself. In a turtle enclosure, they would need to be constantly readministered if any benefit at all is to be had.
Unless the volume of water, O2 exchange, flow rates and avaliable surfaces are massively beyond what an aquatic turtle is generally considered to "need" for physical space- given an enclosure set up with the intention of maintaining a nitrogen cycle (or even chunks of it that still require water changes to remove nitrates), it would be possible to see some use for these products. Say about 200 gallons of water for a four inch turtle (varying slightly based on the general conditions and species of course, some are bulkier or digest more efficiently than others) with a turnover in the neighborhood of 2000gph.
Best thing for aquatic turtles that don't instinctually need to dig around is a substrate free environment and extremely heavy physical and chemical filtration elements with large frequent water changes. Removing the substrate removes areas where waste can get trapped outside of the filter and continue rotting and tends to eliminate dead zones in the flow if the intake and output are played with a bit. The physical waste ends up sitting in a single area for convenient removal and zeolite (used appropriately) will take care of the ammonia. A fifty pound bag of zeolite would last six months to a year depending on the feeding routine and costs about as much as two bottles of nitrosomas and nitrobacter.
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