Pet Turtles: Bedding

"The next thing we're going to talk about is the substrate for your aquarium, substrate is just a fancy way of saying bedding. It's an aquarium but it still has bedding on the bottom of it and what we'll be using for that is some gravel, essentially. You want to make sure that you're buying your gravel from a pet store or make sure that it is pet safe. Not all gravel is created equal. Some of it can leak things in to your water and can create problems. Also you want to make sure that you're buying a very large gravel. This particular on is called a river creek pebble. It's larger than what you would normally see in a fish aquarium. The reason that is, is because turtles do have a tendency some times to like to try to eat gravel. So you want to give them as big of a piece as possible so that we eliminate that problem. You're going to need about 5 gallons of gravel per 5 gallons of tank. So if you have a 40 gallon tank, you're going to need 40 pounds of gravel. This is a 25 pound bag so we're going to probably need two bags and we'll have a little bit left over. You'll take that and you'll spread it in the bottom. You want about an inch or so of gravel on the bottom. Make sure it's all covered nice and even. Now if you're going to put and rocks or things like that in here for him to get up on, you want to make sure you put those in first and put the gravel around them. That way you don't have large rock structures sitting on gravel that could possibly move and cause your rock structure to fall over and break the glass of the aquarium because then you have to buy a whole new aquarium and you have a mess to clean up as well. So that is the type of gravel you're going to use and we'll move on to our next part here."