Guide for Leaving Your Turtle Home Alone

At some point, every turtle owner will have to leave his turtle’s home alone for a weekend or two. Due to my job I have to leave my turtle home alone more than I would like, so I became an expert on this subject. So I decided to write this short guide for everybody who has to leave their turtles all alone at home.

You can leave your turtle home alone if you make sure that you take care of its basic needs: food, an accessible basking area, and clean water. Turtles don’t need day-to-day care, so if you take care of those things you should be able to leave your turtle home alone for a few days.

So let’s take a closer look at each of those three things and see what you have to do. And at the end, I will tell you how you should leave instructions in case somebody will be coming over to look after your turtle. But for now, let’s start with the food.

Food

The first thing that you have to know about turtles and food is that they can go for a long time without food. In the wild, it’s very common for a turtle to go without any kind of food for 2 or 3 weeks. This doesn’t mean that you should let your turtle starve, but leaving it a few days without food should be no problem.

If you leave for just a weekend you really don’t have to worry about food at all. Your turtle won’t even notice that it didn’t eat food that day. There is absolutely no problem.

If you are going to leave your turtle home alone for a week, it should be pretty easy to handle the food situation. Theoretically, you could leave your turtle without food, but in my opinion, it’s a little too much, even if the turtle won’t be affected.

The best solution, in this case, is to ask somebody to come over once or twice during the week and give your turtle food. If they come over only once in the middle of the week, and they feed your turtle, then everything should be alright. If you can’t find anybody to come over to feed your turtles, there are still a lot of solutions.

But if you can’t find anybody to come over you should take into consideration some of the following possibilities.

Aquatic plants

If your turtle is omnivorous, then some aquatic plants should be a good food source for a couple of weeks. They are easy to find at most pet shops, and they are able to stay in the water without any problem for huge amounts of time.

My turtle will always eat the plants that I put in the tank even if I give him food regularly, so there is no question if turtles like them or not.

You can put as many plants as you want in the tank, just make sure that they don’t take up too much space. If you put too many the water will get dirty a lot faster and the turtle will have less space to swim.

Even if somebody is coming over you can still put a couple of aquatic plants in the tank, your turtle will eat them, even if they are fed properly.

The only downside of those plants is that the water will get dirty a lot faster. When turtles bite them, they always live in small parts floating through the water, this is inevitable.

I would recommend you not to rely only on plants, but to combine them with other methods.

Feeder Fish

The next solution is to buy some feeder fish. Feeder fish are the kind of fish that you would normally keep as pets in an aquarium. But in this case, they will be a food source for the turtle.

If you go to any pet shop that sells fish and asks the employees for some good feeder fish for your turtle, they will usually know what to give you. But in case they don’t know what you are talking about here are a few pointers on what you have to get.

A feeder fish has to be small enough so your turtle can eat, and catch them without any problem, and they don’t have to be very fat. If the fish is too fat your turtle can end up with health problems, this is why goldfish are not suitable for this. Here are a few species that are suitable to be feeders:

• Killifish
• Guppies
• Mosquitofish
• Platies
• Bluegills
• Bass
• Crappies

After you get them from the pet store you just place them in the turtle tank, and the turtle will try to catch them when it’s hungry.

Try not to get too many fish, I personally never leave more than 5 fish in the tank, if your turtle gets used to eating only fish, or meat, it will stop eating pellets and other types of foods.

And there is also the problem that they will make a real mess in the tank when they are eaten by the turtle. So try to combine this method with others, don’t rely solely on feeder fish.

Automatic Food Dispenser

Probably the simplest solution to the food problem is to get an automatic food dispenser. I personally find this method very comfortable, and it will also come in handy when you are at home but you have a busy schedule and you don’t have that much time to look after your turtle.

This is the model that I use: Eheim Turtle Feeder, I haven’t tried any model besides this one, but at the moment I don’t have any reason to do so. What I really like about this model and I haven’t seen this at any other models is that it’s very flexible. You can have it release food to your turtle up to 4 times per day, and it can be a double or a normal serving. It is important to remember that it can hold a limited amount of food, but I never had any problem with that. But if you are going to leave for 3 months you definitely need to have somebody come over and refill it once a month. If you want to see the dispenser here is a link to Amazon.

Even with this method, there will be some small bits of food that will remain in the water but that is inevitable.

If you want you can use only this method to feed your turtle, it works fine on its own. But you can always combine it with the rest of them. I personally like to combine all of them, this way my turtle will have a varied diet even when I’m away.

Now that the food problem is solved, let’s move to the next one, the basking area.

Basking Area

The big question when it comes to the basking area is: Should I leave the light on? And the answer depends on how long you are going to be away.

If you leave for just a weekend then you can leave the basking area on, there will be no problem.

But if you leave for a week or more, I wouldn’t recommend you to leave it on for the entire time, due to safety reasons. But leaving your turtle without a basking area is also a bad idea. Luckily the solution is very simple, a timer.

A timer that will turn the lights on at a certain hour, and then turn them off, is what you need in this case. You just have to set the hours, and that’s it. It couldn’t be any simpler. And when you are home and you don’t need them for the basking area you can always use them for something else, like turning on the coffee maker in the morning before you get up.

You can usually find them at stores that deal with electric stuff, or on Amazon: US Plug Format, EU Plug Format.

Water

Unfortunately, when it comes to water, there is no device that I know of that can change the water for you while you are away.

So my advice is to change the water before you leave and fill the tank as much as possible.

One problem that most people forget is that water can evaporate, especially on really hot days, and if too much water evaporates your turtle won’t be able to reach the basking area.

If you leave for a maximum of two weeks, your turtle should be just fine. Water won’t evaporate that fast, and the dirtiness of the water will be tolerable.

But if you leave your turtle alone for more than two weeks, you definitely need somebody to come over and change, or at least refill the water.

If Somebody Is Coming Over

One final thing that I want to talk about is how to properly instruct somebody to take care of a turtle. I know that it’s not that hard, but I personally want to make sure that I do everything that I can to make sure things will go smoothly.

When It comes to food I like to leave exact measurements. So if I feed my turtle 20 pellets per day, for example, I will write on a piece of paper that I will leave near the food: “ Feed the turtle 20 pellets “. I do this because somebody that doesn’t own a turtle will not know how much a turtle eats, so they can think that the turtle only eats 2 pellets or half a bag.

Depending on how you feed your turtle you should write that down for the person that comes over, you can tell them the number of pellets that you give them, or you can always use measurement tools like a spoon for example.

If possible I try to avoid somebody else changing the water, because it usually takes some time to do things correctly. But if the water needs to be changed, I like to leave everything they will need close at hand, and I will write the instructions on a piece of paper as well.

I would recommend you to do the same. Leaving exact instructions will make it simpler for the person that is changing the water, and for the turtle as well.

And one final thing that I recommend doing is using a sharpie to mark the level of the water. In case the water evaporates the person coming over will know that it needs to be refilled.

Common Questions

Do turtles get lonely? No, turtles are not social creatures at all. They actually prefer to spend most of their time alone. The only time they interact with other turtles is when they have to mate. Turtles also don’t miss the company of their owner as well.

Can you overfeed a turtle? Yes, turtles can be overfed. If a turtle is overfed it will start developing a condition called pyramiding. Pyramiding is when a turtle’s scutes will start to develop too much, and shapes resembling pyramids will form on the carapace.

How long can turtles go without basking? Turtles can go long periods of time without basking, but it’s not healthy for them. If a turtle doesn’t bask for a long period of time it can catch a cold, or it can develop other serious health problems.

Final Thoughts

Fortunately, turtles don’t require any day-to-day care, so leaving them alone should be no problem.

In short, if you leave for only one weekend you most likely don’t have to do anything, you can just leave your turtle just as it is, and feed it right before you leave.

If you leave for a week,  ideally you will find somebody that can come once or twice to give your turtle some food, and a timer plug for the basking area.

If you are going to leave for more than one week you will definitely need somebody to come over and look after your turtle from time to time. And at this point, I would also recommend you to take a look at the automatic feeder.

Hello,

If you enjoy the content that we create, please consider saying a "Thank You!" by leaving a tip.

Every little bit can help us tremendously in continuing to create quality content that helps turtle and tortoise owners around the world.

We really appreciate the kindness and support that you show us!