This is a video of a yearling Southern painted turtle that arrived today. It was pretty cold outside, so even though the turtle was packaged with a heat pack, I wanted to give it time to warm up at its own pace. I set it in a cooler spot of the basking area so it could warm up gradually.
It didn’t take the turtle long to perk up. The video starts about 10 seconds after I placed the turtle into the basking area. (I had to walk over to the camera server to start recording.) The rest is unedited and is exactly how long it took the yearling to dive (well, fall actually) into the water.
It’s having no problems in the water, though. It’s able to easily swim the length and depth of the tank and to surface for air when it needs to. It’s already happily pestering the older Southern painted turtle in the tank. Kids do like to play.
The reason the water is murky is because the yearling is smaller than I thought it would be, so I had to “child-proof” the habitat by removing some rock formations that it could have gotten stuck under. That stirred up some dust from the Flourite substrate. It’ll clear up in a few hours.