The end of winter strikes hard

[Paschendale52]

Here in Albuquerque we got warm again a couple of weeks ago for about a week. Then it went back into the 40s, but now we're coming back up.

Today I went outside and saw that one of the map turtles, who I saw swimming around a month ago after the worst of the winter, was at the bottom and didn't seem to be moving. After fishing them out I confirmed the worst.

My only thought, given that I saw this turtle out and swimming around the bottom in the warm weather a few weeks ago, is that the weather warmed up and their metabolism got going again. I'm guessing they didn't eat anything with the warmer weather and then another month of being in the cold water was too much.

For those of you who saw my thread a couple months ago about my southern painted turtle not doing well in the pond over the winter, this makes two of the 6 turtles in the pond doing poorly through the winter. The southern painted turtle made a full recovery and has been hanging out in the indoor tank since January, but this map turtle didn't make it.

I think my big take away from this is that I should have waited until the spring to move everyone outside and get the giant mexican musk turtles. I think I got ahead of myself in moving everyone out into the pond. They didn't seem to have enough time to acclimate to the pond and being fed in a much larger area before winter hit. The map turtles are still extremely skittish, and rarely if ever come up to the surface when I'm outside. For feeding them all through September and October I just had to toss food in the pond and hope they ate some of it before it got picked up in the skimmer. The razorback musk turtle and southern painted turtle were better, but still not great at taking food in the pond. They definitely didn't come right up to the surface to get food when they saw me. I think this lack of eating is probably what made the southern painted have issues early on in the winter.

In a couple weeks I'll put her back out into the pond and try to check up on all the other map turtles.

If anyone has any suggestions or advice for future pond feeding or winterization, I'm all ears.

Thanks!

 

[wellington]

So very sorry for your losses. Here in Chicago it's been a strange winter. Pretty mild for winter. Temps, really up and down. Yesterday 70 today 37.

 

[Tim Carlisle]

So very sorry for your losses. Here in Chicago it's been a strange winter. Pretty mild for winter. Temps, really up and down. Yesterday 70 today 37.

Started out in the 50's here, got windy as hell, then dropped down to 42. Tomorrow not looking much better. Was looking forward to making some improvments on my tort fence.

 

[wellington]

Started out in the 50's here, got windy as hell, then dropped down to 42. Tomorrow not looking much better. Was looking forward to making some improvments on my tort fence.

We are back up to 60 tomorrow and most of next week, with just a couple high 40's.
Mother Nature is mentalpausing lol
Yes I meant to write mentalpausing lol

 

[Paschendale52]

We are back at 70 after 3 weeks in the 40s. Tuesday is set for 40 and then back to the 70s for the season theoretically.

I'm excited to get more plants in the pond and get Fatty back out in the pond in a week or so. Hopefully the other map turtles come out and are doing just fine. I just saw another one today that is out and moving. That leaves two unaccounted for. But there are lots of hiding places and as I mentioned they are extremely shy.

 

[mark1]

how long have you had these turtles ? personally i doubt it was from lack of food ........ it's possible ,but it would take a long time for that to be an issue , especially at colder temperatures ...... a turtles(poikilotherms) energy requirements are a fraction of that of a homeotherm .....

 

[zovick]

Here in Albuquerque we got warm again a couple of weeks ago for about a week. Then it went back into the 40s, but now we're coming back up.

Today I went outside and saw that one of the map turtles, who I saw swimming around a month ago after the worst of the winter, was at the bottom and didn't seem to be moving. After fishing them out I confirmed the worst.

My only thought, given that I saw this turtle out and swimming around the bottom in the warm weather a few weeks ago, is that the weather warmed up and their metabolism got going again. I'm guessing they didn't eat anything with the warmer weather and then another month of being in the cold water was too much.

For those of you who saw my thread a couple months ago about my southern painted turtle not doing well in the pond over the winter, this makes two of the 6 turtles in the pond doing poorly through the winter. The southern painted turtle made a full recovery and has been hanging out in the indoor tank since January, but this map turtle didn't make it.

I think my big take away from this is that I should have waited until the spring to move everyone outside and get the giant mexican musk turtles. I think I got ahead of myself in moving everyone out into the pond. They didn't seem to have enough time to acclimate to the pond and being fed in a much larger area before winter hit. The map turtles are still extremely skittish, and rarely if ever come up to the surface when I'm outside. For feeding them all through September and October I just had to toss food in the pond and hope they ate some of it before it got picked up in the skimmer. The razorback musk turtle and southern painted turtle were better, but still not great at taking food in the pond. They definitely didn't come right up to the surface to get food when they saw me. I think this lack of eating is probably what made the southern painted have issues early on in the winter.

In a couple weeks I'll put her back out into the pond and try to check up on all the other map turtles.

If anyone has any suggestions or advice for future pond feeding or winterization, I'm all ears.

Thanks!

If you really want to know why the turtle died instead of just guessing, have a necropsy done. It isn't all that costly especially when you consider that it could potentially help keep you from losing more animals.

If you want a necropsy done, do not freeze the dead animal.

 

[Paschendale52]

how long have you had these turtles ? personally i doubt it was from lack of food ........ it's possible ,but it would take a long time for that to be an issue , especially at colder temperatures ...... a turtles(poikilotherms) energy requirements are a fraction of that of a homeotherm .....

The painted turtle who is currently inside that I posted about a couple of months ago I got in 2015 I believe.

The map turtle I got in June 2020. They were in an aquarium until September 2022 and then moved into my 8000 gallon pond when I finished it. I did a whole post on their weights and such before putting them into the pond. I know that energy use is super low, but if they hadn't eaten a whole lot before the cold weather started in October, I figured that 5 months is a long time, even for a cold-blooded animal. Would you agree with that?

I'd never considered a necropsy. Would it still be relevant after they'd been buried for a couple days? I'm not super excited about the idea of digging them up (just buried in the back yard a foot deep or so), but I'll look and see if someone nearby would do it.

 

[mark1]

i don't think 5 months is long for a healthy turtle ..... i've had sick turtles go much longer than that ....... i would guess stress (relocation, brumation)and an underlying disease....... had they been hibernated by you previously ? was the water surface easily accessible ? on warm sunny spells in winter did they bask ? what kind of temperature fluctuations did the pond experience ???

 

[Paschendale52]

i don't think 5 months is long for a healthy turtle ..... i've had sick turtles go much longer than that ....... i would guess stress (relocation, brumation)and an underlying disease....... had they been hibernated by you previously ? was the water surface easily accessible ? on warm sunny spells in winter did they bask ? what kind of temperature fluctuations did the pond experience ???

The water surface was easily accessible in a few places in the pond. They hadn't been hibernated before. I moved from northern CA to Albuquerque with them in October 2021 and I'm sure that was stressful. They were in a warmed stock tank inside for about two months and then have been in an aquarium doing really well since December 2021/January 2022.

In September 2022, I moved them into the pond. I saw them bask only once and it was up on the side wall of the pond. Since that was not supposed to be accessible and would let them get out, I fixed it so they would have only the large basking platform to bask on, but I rarely saw them basking. I think that goes back them being very skittish.

On warm sunny days (for us here we had a couple of days in the 50/60s) with really strong sun (at high altitude) I would seem them sometimes moving to shallow places in the pond, but still staying down ~2' or so and never basking.

Temperature fluctuations would be mostly in the low 40s through bulk of the winter to some occasional days in the 50s or 60s. The big warm spell we had recently got to the high 60s/low 70s for a few days. Then back to the 40s.

 

[mark1]

it's always appeared to me changing enclosures is pretty stressful on them .......i've got turtles that have been in the same enclosure their entire lives , ranging from 8-20yrs , their habits become pretty apparent, and i believe are important to their health .... i find their habits to be consistent enough to be a good indicator of a health problem , not basking, at least here, would be a pretty abnormal behavior , skittish i don't believe is a reason not to bask ...... i would guess they are stressed/not comfortable in their surroundings ..... i have turtles that haven't been touched in years , i'm sure there are a few haven't been touched in at least a decade , they see me and they are gone , if they don't take off there is most likely something wrong with them ......
i would suggest a log half submerged where they can climb out on easily and dive in the water even easier ....... i do believe stress and an underlying condition exacerbated by stress is more likely than starvation .....

i would think those that survive this first year will have time to acclimate to their enclosure and start forming habits conducive to surviving in their enclosure .......your pond is above ground , an advantage to an in ground pond is the ground helps to moderate temp swings ..... i use the ground and lots of big rocks to slow down the temp swings.....

 

[Paschendale52]

it's always appeared to me changing enclosures is pretty stressful on them .......i've got turtles that have been in the same enclosure their entire lives , ranging from 8-20yrs , their habits become pretty apparent, and i believe are important to their health .... i find their habits to be consistent enough to be a good indicator of a health problem , not basking, at least here, would be a pretty abnormal behavior , skittish i don't believe is a reason not to bask ...... i would guess they are stressed/not comfortable in their surroundings ..... i have turtles that haven't been touched in years , i'm sure there are a few haven't been touched in at least a decade , they see me and they are gone , if they don't take off there is most likely something wrong with them ......
i would suggest a log half submerged where they can climb out on easily and dive in the water even easier ....... i do believe stress and an underlying condition exacerbated by stress is more likely than starvation .....

i would think those that survive this first year will have time to acclimate to their enclosure and start forming habits conducive to surviving in their enclosure .......your pond is above ground , an advantage to an in ground pond is the ground helps to moderate temp swings ..... i use the ground and lots of big rocks to slow down the temp swings.....

Thanks for the info Mark. That could be. These guys rarely basked even in the aquarium indoors. I know thats a bit strange for map turtles, but its how they've been since hatchlings. Every now and again when I stepped on the bottom step of the stairs or jingled the keys in the lock to the front door, out of eyesight, but within hearing distance of the aquarium, I would hear the telltale ploop of them diving off the basking platform into the water.

Only part of the pond is above ground, in places its 5' deep and only the top 2' is above ground. The water stays pretty consistent due to the rapid circulation of the pond from the bottom which is 3' deep up through the filters and such. I don't have a big log in there right now, mostly because I couldn't find one that was long enough to get out of the water without resting on the edge of the pond to provide an escape vector. I'll look around and try to get one for the spring though. Thats a good idea, thanks.

Hopefully everyone else comes through ok. When I put fatty back in the pond in a couple weeks I'm hopeful that the 6 or so months until the next cooling time is plenty of time for them to get happy and acclimated for the next winter.

I also planned on adding a feeding ring, so they can get used to the food being in the same spot and I can leave without it getting in the skimmer.

 

[Paschendale52]

This also sounds like pretty good reinforcement of my "lesson learned" from this. Transfers out into the pond need to happen at least a few months before winter. And likely as close to the start of spring as I can in the future.