Red-Eared Slider Turtle Free Essay Example

The Red-Eared Slider Turtle (Trachemys scripta elegans) inhabit freshwater lakes, streams, swamps, ponds and rivers. Male sliders become sexually mature when they are between 2 and 5 years old and are about 4 inches long. Females take longer to mature, reaching maturity when they are 5 to 7 years old and 6 to 7. 5 inches long. Mating and courtship usually occurs between March and June. Slider turtles spend most of their time basking on rocks, logs near the water. Sometimes the red-eared slider turtles will be stacked on top of each other, from late morning till late afternoon.

Young slider turtles are more carnivorous than adults.

They usually eat aquatic snails, tadpoles, crawfish, fish, crustaceans and mollusks. They also eat plants like arrowhead, water lilies, hyacinths and duckweed. Is the age of a turtle dependent to the size of the shell? When trying to determine the Turtles age it is best to use two pleurals, ventrebrals, and marginals on the carapace. Determine a turtle’s age you have to count the scutes on a turtle’s carapace.

After getting all of the numbers you are going to need to round the number of scutes to get an age, age will not always be accurate. When graphing the results the y-axis was the length of the shell and the x-axis was the age.

When measuring the carapace start from the beginning of the shell to the end, do not measure head, tail, or legs. When measuring the shell you should use a flexible ruler and you should measure it using centimeters.

The Graph shows that there is no correlation between the turtle’s age and its shell size. Graph one shows that a younger turtle can have a bigger shell than a turtle that is older than it. The youngest turtle has a shell of 19 centimeters and the oldest turtle only has a shell of 16 centimeters. The graph also shows that the older the shell grows with age.

The charts show us the age of the turtle and how many scutes there were in every part of the carapace and on the plastron. The chart also shows us the size of the shell and gives another example that the age and size have no correlation. The charts show that it is better to have different groups using the same thing because there can always be differences in your results. The charts and graphs show that the age of a turtle is not determined by the size but the number of scutes on the turtles shell. Some possible errors are that when counting the scutes you can miss some or you can also count some extra ones.

The age you get can be wrong because a turtle sheds its scutes. To further research you can research how scutes grow and if there are any reasons a scute won’t grow one year. The age of a turtle is not determined by the size of its shell but by the number of scutes on its shell. When counting the scutes you have be careful because you may miss some or you might count more than their actually is. You may not always get an accurate number because some of the scutes could have come off when shedding or scratched off. There are many reasons why someone might miss a scute.

The graph and charts show that age of a turtle is not related with the size of a turtles shell. The graph shows that the youngest turtle has biggest shell. The graph shows that the size of the shell is not determined by the age of the turtle. There are many reasons why a turtles shell might have lost some of its scutes. When determining the age by counting the scutes you can always be of by one to three years. There are also possibilities that growth is affected by what they eat and how much they eat. The size of the turtles shell does not determine how old the turtle is but is determined by how many scutes there are on the shell. ?

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