My turtle Crush, I have many stories about him.
When I first started uni I lived on campus. Took my tiny baby turtle with me, of course, and his tank was on the flood beside my desk. Sitting studying at the desk one day, I could hear a lot of bumping around in the tank, as he often did, so I didn't pay too much attention. Eventually I did look down, to find him hanging upsidedowm from the frame of his UV light, which sat about a foot above the water. As I looked over, he craned his neck to look up at me, I could swear he grinned, and then he let go and plopped backwards into the water. I quickly checked his feet for burns, and he was fine, and I still have no idea how he managed to get up there!
Another day, sitting at that same desk, with my phone sitting there beside me, it began to ring. On silent, it vibrated itself right off the desk and down into his tank. I missed the call.
Last year, my 4th year of uni, he lived in a 4ft tank in my lounge room. I bought him some feeder fish one day, and released them all into the tank. Usually live fish are far too fast for him to catch, so I just put them in there and let them breed, and fish out and kill any as I wanted to feed them to him. This day I released about 20, and he promptly started catching one after the other, and goring himself like mad. Worried he would eat too much, I caught him, waited for him to swallow what was in his mouth underwater, then pulled him out of the tank so that he would stop eating. He straight away vomited the entire lot of freshly bought, and now dead, fish, all over me. Figuring that was done, I put him back in and went to clean myself up. When I came back, he was busy catching all the rest of the fish in the tank, so I caught him up again, pulled him out, and the promptly brought them all back up all over me again.
I stuck him in his travelling box for an hour, to think about what he'd done.
After that, he went back to being unable to catch live fish.
Whenever I fed him prawns, or something disgustingly messy, I'd put him in a seperate feeding tank, so he didn't foul up the main tank too much, and make cleaning easier. On one of these occasions, I fed him some prawn meat. After he'd finished the main chunk, he went around hoovering up all the left over bits off the bottom of the feeding tank. There was a bit of white gravel in the bottom. He picked up one white rock in his mouth, and, realising it wasn't prawn, spat it out. He continued to hoover, and eventually picked up a second rock, my friend and I sat and watched, expecting him to spit it out. It disappeared. We panicked! the rock was half the size of his head, big enough to fit down his mouth, but far too big to come out the other end. I cleaned out the feeding tank, removed all gravel, and left him in there for a few days, to see if he pooed. After a week of keeping a close eye on him, and no poo. I took him to the vets. The vet said to wait a while longer, as the rock may be of the type that will break up inside him, and he may pass it in a few days. Bring him back in another week if nothing had happened. At 6 days he began squeezing his eyes tightly shut all the time, like he was trying to push something out. He went back to the vet the next day, to be x-rayed. The x-rays showed nothing, so the vet sent me home again to get a rock of the same type Crush had eaten. We x-rayed that, and it showed up, so that clearly wasn't the problem. The vet concluded that it had indeed broken up inside up, but that the bits must have blocked something. Poor Crush had to have a little turtle enema. It flushed him out, and he continued to poop nicely for the next few days
I have many stories about him, he was a most enteratining little turtle. His favourite pasttime was to sit on the couch and watch tv with us. Unfortunately he died last year, of a multi-drug resistant bacterial infection. Rest In Peace little man.
