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Can i keep a baby turtle in my fish tank

Only if your tank is big enough! What size tank do you have? (it will need to be a pretty big one).

Short answer: No.

Perhaps if you had a tank of several hundred gallons, some full-spectrum UV lights rigged up over the tank, extremely powerful filtration, a place out of the water for the turtle to bask on, and enough money to constantly replace the fish that would get eaten, then I suppose it might work.

Really the only time fish and turtles should be kept together is in large ponds with large fish. Even then, I've seen large koi with serious injuries caused by turtles.

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I'm not your neighbor, you Bakersfield trash.

well there might be a few turtle species that are small enough to fit in like a 75 gallon tank pretty good.

IMO the answer is no, I agree with Natalie

-Josh

My Murray River Short Neck has not touched the bigger fish.......just the bite size ones. They are now in seperate tanks.



PS - You do mean tortoise and not turtle, don't you?



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Just one more tank........

Tortoises can't swim. If you put one in a fish tank it would drown. Turtles are aquatic. Making a setup in which a turle and fish could live together would involve lots of research and require a huge tank. You would basicly have to set up a mini ecosystem that revolved around the type of turtle that you had, with fish and plants that come from a similar system and there would be fish loss. You can't change what an animal likes to eat.



- Meow -

Actually, some young tortoises can swim. They can't do it very well though, and they mainly just float and kick their legs around. It's pretty funny to watch.

Once they get older though, their shells get too heavy and they just sink like you mentioned. It's likely that the tortoises on the Galapagos Islands got there from young tortoises that floated there after storms.

Anyway, tortoises don't belong in fish tanks (or any other aquatic environment for that matter).

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I'm not your neighbor, you Bakersfield trash.

I have a 3ft fish tank with approximately 30 gallons which holds my macquarie river short neck who's shell is about 5 inches long ways. The short answer to a turtle with other fish is no but that is also a generalisation. if you start with a baby turtle like i did you can almost condition him not to hunt because if regularly fed he wont need to. i have 12 danios, 1 firemouth, 3 keyholes, 1 ghost knife fish, 1 sailfin pleco, a gourami and a few small bristlenose catfish and aslong as i dont let him go more than about a week without a good feed then he doesnt even look at them. aslong as what you have with your turtle is a fair bit bigger than his head and is fast than you will generally not have any casualties.

I take that back.....last time I looked, Murry River Shortnecks were still classified as tortoises....

Murry River Shortneck

Are they turtles or tortoises?
There has been debate about this point for a number of years, but most authorities, zoos and herpetologists now classify them as freshwater turtles rather than tortoises. In the strictest definition, a turtle has flippers and lives in the ocean, emerging only to lay eggs, while a tortoise has feet and lives on land, only rarely venturing into water. Freshwater turtles have webbed feet (apart from the pignosed turtle which does have flippers) and are nearly completely aquatic, so it certainly makes more sense to call them freshwater turtles than tortoises.

From Adelaide Aquariums Website








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Just one more tank........