How Much and How Often Should I Feed My Turtle? +Schedule

As a new turtle owner, one of the essential things that you have to know is how much and how often you should feed your turtle. When I got my first turtle I was really panicked because I couldn’t find any good and reliable information. But over the years I tried a lot of methods and techniques, and I finally got the hang of it. So in this article, I am going to share with you everything that I learned.

Adult turtles should be fed once every three days using the “size of the head method” which requires you to give your turtle food using a recipient that is approximately the same size as its head. If the turtle is younger you have to feed it once every two days.

Overall, this is the best approach to feeding any turtle, but there are other methods that have various advantages and disadvantages. But before we take a look at those methods, let’s start by taking a look at what turtles eat, and what a balanced diet will look like.

What Type of Food You Should Feed Your Turtle

The first thing that we have to take a look at is what type of food you should give your turtle.

Turtles are omnivorous, this means tha they will eat fruits, vegetables, and meat. The only things that they can’t eat are processed foods like pasta, bread, salami, sausages, etc. The only exception, are pellets, which should actually make up a good part of what they eat.

A balanced diet will be like this:

80% pellets
10% fruits and vegetables
10% meat / dried insects

As you can see pellets will make up most of their diet, while fruits, vegetables, and meat will be like snacks, or treats.. While all of them have their benefits pellets contain on average everything that a turtle needs, while vegetables for example, only contain some of the nutrients that a turtle needs.

If you own a juvenile or a baby turtle you should know that they will need special turtle pleats which contain more protein than regular ones. If you can’t find pellets for juveniles or babies you can always give them a little more meat or dried insects.

As you can imagine, there are a lot of different types of turtle food types and brands, and some of them are better than others. If you want to know which of them are the best and which you should avoid you should check out this article: Best Turtle Food (We Tested 20 Different Brands)

So, you should give your turtle pellets regularly, and once a week give it some extra dried crickets or some leafy greens.

Just make sure to be careful when giving your turtle fruits, as not all of them are safe. Here You can find a list of what is safe and what isn’t: Can Turtles Eat Fruits? (How Much, How Often + List).

And the same thing applies to fish, not all of them are safe for turtles to eat. SO here is a shortlist of which fish you should avoid and which are good.

Fish to Avoid	Feeder Fish
Goldfish	Guppies
Rosy Red Minnows	Bass
Carp	Neon Tetra
Gizzard Shad	Bluegills
Feathered Minnows	Crappies

Now that we cover what you should give your turtle to eat, let’s see how much you should give it.

How Much Food You Should Feed Your Turtle

Over the years this question had many different answers, but with trial and error the wrong answers have been discarded and now we are left with two possible answers.

There are two methods that have proven themselves to be reliable, and they are called: “The 15 Minutes Method” and “The Size of the Head Method”. So let’s take a closer look at them and see how they work.

The 15 Minutes Method

The 15 minutes method is very simple, you give your turtle a lot of food, and let it eat for 15 minutes. After that, you remove the food.

As simple as this method might be it’s definitely not the best, of the two. This is because turtles, wild and pets, are opportunistic feeders by nature. This means that they will eat everything that they can in the fastest time possible because they don’t know when they will have the chance to eat again. Even if you feed them regularly they will not abandon this mentality.

Another way to think about this is how much food can a normal person eat in 15 minutes. At a normal rate, most people will be full if they eat constantly for 15 minutes. And if they eat at a fast pace, there is no doubt that they will be more than full. While turtles and humans function differently, this comparison is to show that the idea of a timed meal is not that great when you compare it to a fixed amount of food.

There are a few people out there that recommend this feeding method, but there are a lot more than say that is a sure way to overfeed your turtle. And I have to agree to feed your turtle this way is not a good choice.

Before moving to the next method I want to add that overfeeding your turtle can be a major problem. Unlike most animals that just get chubby if they eat too much, turtles will also develop other health problems, like pyramiding, which affects the growth of the shell and it’s irremediable.

The Size of the Head Method

This method is just as simple as the 15-minute method, albeit a little bit different. This method says that you should feed your turtle the same amount of food that it would take to fill its head (without the neck) as if it were hollow.

The simplest way to put this method into practice is to find a small container, like a medicine cup, a shot glass, or a bottle cap. This container has to be approximately the same size as the head of your turtle, without the neck. Then you fill that container to the top, and then you can feed the food inside the container to your turtle.

You don’t always have to use a container, you can always just estimate the food that you would need to fill its head. If you sometimes give your turtle a little too much food, and sometimes you give it a little less, there will be no problem. Your turtle won’t be affected by small differences.

This method works great because it takes into consideration the size of the turtle, and gives you a fixed amount of food that you have to give your turtle. And as the turtle grows the amount of food will grow with it.

This is the method I’ve been using to feed my turtles for the last 5 years, and all of them are in great shape.

Between the two methods, I would definitely recommend you the size of the head method, as it’s guaranteed that you won’t overfeed your turtle, and as an added bonus it doesn’t take that much time either.

Now that you know what and how much to feed your turtle, let’s take a look at how often you should be feeding your turtle.

How Often You Should Feed Your Turtle

This part is really simple, but it will vary depending on the age of your turtle. If your turtle, adult turtles have a different schedule than juveniles, and juveniles have a different schedule than baby turtles.

The life stage of a turtle is not always determined by the age itself, but rather by the size. Overall, a turtle is considered a baby when it’s small enough to be held in the palm, in the case of most turtle species, this stage lasts for about 6 months.

Juvenile turtles are turtles that are still growing. And adult turtles are turtles that have reached their maximum size. So if you search on google for the species of your turtle and then type average size you should get an idea if your turtle is an adult or a juvenile. (If your turtle still needs a couple of inches to reach its full size you can consider it an adult.)

Now let’s get back to how often you should feed your turtle.

If your turtle is an adult you should feed it once every 3 days. And this will look like this.

If your turtle is a juvenile you should feed it once every 2 days. Here is how that will look.

If your turtle is still a baby you should feed it every day. This is how a feeding schedule will look.

Missing a feeding day shouldn’t be a problem for any turtle, regardless of its age. In the wild turtles can go for weeks, even months without food, and they are fine, so a small delay shouldn’t be a problem.

If you forget to feed your turtle once, simply feed it the next day, and then resume your normal schedule.

Can You Overfeed a Turtle?

The idea behind having a schedule, and a proper diet is to avoid overfeeding your turtle. While underfeeding can also be a problem, this rarely happens as turtles are able to live months without food, so as long as you are giving it food it shouldn’t be a problem.

There are two main things that can result from overfeeding.

The first possibility is that your turtle will get fat. And this is a really serious problem for a turtle. Unlike other animals, a very big part of the turtle’s body is covered by the shell, so there is no room to accommodate any fat. And this means that the extra fat will drastically affect the internal organs.

If you want to see how this looks, and what to do if it already happened you should check out this article, where I cover this subject in more detail: Can Turtles Get Fat or Overweight? What to Do in This Situation

The other thing that can happen is that your turtle can end up suffering from pyramiding. Pyramiding is an irreversible problem specific to turtles, where the upper part of the shell will overdevelop and get bigger and thicker.

This process is irreversible and can have serious health consequences if it gets out of control. But luckily easier forms of pyramiding won’t affect a turtle too much, and it can be stopped, but not reversed if you act soon.

Here is a picture of what pyramiding looks like:

So, if all of those bad things can happen if a turtle eats too much, why do they insist on getting more food?

Turtles Tend to Act as if They Are Hungry All the Time

This is something that a lot of new turtle owners seem to notice and worry about, but you shouldn’t.

Turtles are opportunistic feeders by nature, this means that they will always eat when the opportunity presents itself, even if they are not hungry. You need to respect a strict feeding schedule. Even if your turtle seems hungry, it actually isn’t.

If your turtle always seems hungry, the best thing that you can do is ignore it.

As strange as it might sound, the best thing for you and for your turtle is to ignore this type of behavior. Even if your turtle seems hungry, it actually isn’t. Is just in their nature to take advantage of every possible chance of getting food, even if they are not hungry.

As long as you know that you are properly feeding your turtle the right type of food, you are giving it the right amount of food, and that you have a proper feeding schedule then there is no reason to believe that your turtle is actually hungry.

If you are doing everything right, and you get fooled by your turtle into giving it more food there is a good chance that you will end up overfeeding your turtle, which can result in serious health problems.

In the wild, most turtles don’t have access to a proper meal too often. And most of the time they will have to jump on every opportunity that presents itself, those opportunities can take a lot of shapes, a cricket that didn’t notice the turtle and got too close to it, a wild berry bush, a slow fish, etc.

As you can imagine turtles are far from being the most efficient predator, or the fastest animal out there (but they are not actually as slow as you might expect How Fast Are Turtles? (a Turtle That Can Reach 150 MPH)), so when an opportunity arises they can’t afford do lose it.

This type of behavior is crucial for a turtle, and without it, they wouldn’t have been able to survive. And even as pets, they will retain it.

Pet turtles, even if you just feed, don’t have a way of knowing that you will do this again, even if you’ve been doing it for the past 5 years. And they will always be looking out for more food.

Final Thoughts

This is what you should know about feeding your turtle. Pellets should be the base of any diet, and fruits, vegetables, and meat should be used as treats. While all of them have their benefits pellets contain on average everything that a turtle needs, while vegetables for example, only contain some of the nutrients that a turtle needs.

As for how much to feed your turtle, simply find a small container that is about the same size as the head of your turtle and fill it with pellets. While doing my research I found countless different methods, but all of them had flaws, some of them could easily lead to overfeeding, while others were simply unpractical. So the best option remains the size of the head method.

Feeding your adult turtle once every 3 days is one of the best options, this will ensure that your turtle won’t get overweight, and it won’t starve either.

I hope this article answered all of your questions, but in case you want to know something that you couldn’t find in the article, feel free to use the comment section below, I do my best to answer all comments as soon as I see them.