Apologies, right up front, to fans of Eli and his antics, because this is another turtle post. In my defence, enough people have commented on how funny our 'non-shrimp-eating' turtles are, that I think it is only fair that I defend their honour and update their status to predators in our tank now that they've been exerting some top-down pressure on the crayfish (apologies for the top-down term - it just means that the turtles have eaten a few - but I am a food web ecologist after all). As you may recall, we recently bought 10 'feeder' crays and much to my distress, the turtles hadn't fed on any of them. Some have actually grown quite a lot, by virtue of their apparent fearlessness and hunger for the turtle food, as you can see in some of these photos.
But that all changed on Tuesday, when we got home and discovered Zoomy tucking into a crayfish tail!
Eli and I have since checked the tank to see how many crayfish are left (by lifting up the log most of them live under) and we think that the population has been cut by five, which means the turtles probably won't need quite so much frozen food tomorrow morning (although they always seem hungry!).
As an aside, I am, perhaps a little ambitiously, actually hoping that this experience will teach Eli not only a few things about life and death in the animal world but also a few things about subtraction...one can only hope. At least he hasn't been distressed by the loss of a few crayfish, we both actually found it highly entertaining!
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