The other day I was cleaning Ozzy's out door pool. I brought the 2 crayfish, 1 fish, and 2 snails in the house and put them in a round single serving microvable bowl. I put Ozzy in the middle of it.
All of a sudden, Ozzy started spinning like a top. The crayfish and the fish (food) were swimming along the edge of the bowl, and Oz was in the middle trying to catch them. We all laughed.
The crayfish were dinner that day.
Sometimes I feed Ozzy bugs that I find in the yard. I always dump them on one of the rocks in the pool. Ozzy always swims in the water to the highest part of the rock, where it's a straight drop to the water. He bobs up and down in the water trying to pull bugs from the side and the top of the rock. I put him on top of the low side of the rock with the bugs once. He imediatly slid into the water and swam to the other side of the rock to hunt his food.
Ozzy is under water, by the rock I usually put the bugs on. That is a toy to the right side of the pool.
A friend hatched some red eared sliders last August. We have had Ozzy since September, he is still about 2cm. It has been fun trying to figure out what he eats. Turtles are messy eaters, and they must eat in water. We give him some of his food in a separate dish so we don't have to clean his swimming bowl often. Here are the foods he (may be a she) eats. He loves raw hamburger, but it is very messy, and must be cleaned the same day. He really likes tuna too, it is very messy, but not as nasty as hamburger. It is hillarious watching him chase minnows around the baby pool we have outside for him. They need moving water with air added. He also eats plants, dandilion greans and flowers, algae, shreded carrot, raw pumkin strings (from our jack-o-lanterns), cabbage, and bits of banana. Besides what we give him, he will snap up any bug that gets in his area. ReptoMin and dry cat food are good too.
We got two yellow eared sliders from Paster Wednesday before last. They hatched about 2 weeks before. Paster took the Royal Rangers to the creek that runs behind the church last spring where they saw a turtle laying the eggs. He took a few and hatched them.
Our first unit in Science 4 is Ecosystems: Interdependence of Life and the next unit is Plant and Animal Interactions. How cool is that? Learning about their new pets is part of the science lessons.
So far they have eaten turtle food and cabbage. I got them a cuttlebone, but we haven't observed them biting it. Turtles are omnivores. We'll, I mean the kids, will have to catch some bugs for them, and maybe some small fish from the creek.
