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You don't have to fill it up all the way to the top -- like 10 or 11 inches deep -- although you can if you want to, to give the turtle more space to swim. The water should be deep enough to completely cover the turtle, plus a few more inches to spare, so the turtle can actually swim. Like, 6 inches deep, at least, for an adult turtle.

Edited to add: if you have a female turtle, you can't keep the tank like this all the time, because female turtles need to lay eggs from time to time, or they will die, and they won't lay eggs in water. They will only lay them on dry land. Obviously, you have to have one of those floating dock things, because turtles need to dry their shells off several times a day, or the shell will grow mold and fungus and get infected. But apparently, a floating dock is not sufficient for egg-laying. They need to get completely out of the water to lay eggs (see the Related Link below).

I only just recently found out about this. I've been keeping my female red-eared slider in deep water with a floating dock. When she was little, I used to make an actual beach for her out of gravel -- you know, by piling the gravel into a flat mound at one end of the tank. But if you do that, you can only fill the tank up a few inches, because those gravel mounds can only go so high -- if you build them too high, they just keep falling down ten minutes later. So the water level has to stay at like, 3 inches. Which is fine for a tiny baby turtle, but not for an 8-inch adult turtle. Three inches of water only just barely covers an adult turtle's shell.

You know, it's not like they need deep water, but unless you buy one of those gigantic, 3 foot-wide tanks (which cost hundreds of dollars and would take up like, half the space of my whole apartment), the only way to give the turtle space is to make the water deep. If you have a tank that is 30 inches by 12 inches, that's just about long enough for the turtle to take 5 steps, and only just barely enough room to turn around and go back the other way. But if the tank is filled with 11 inches of water, all of a sudden, there's an extra dimension of space.

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15y ago

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