Turtle Thursday: Bad Pics

Jay observing.

Jay looking from behind Dante.

Someone gave me a really sorry 1.3 mega pixel dig cam several months ago. I recently found the drivers and got the darned thing to work. Sort of. No matter what I do it takes barely okay pics. It has no zoom, it has no viewfinder, it's just an easy to carry "flat foto" camera. So I wanted to test it out on the turtles, and got fairly poor results. These are not up to my usual photographic standards. However it managed to capture a curious Jay three times. Each of my turtles has his own charm, but Jay is the only tan one, and the only one diagnosed as "evil" by the pet shop he came from. So today is a Jay day. Hello Jay! He's named after Jay from the movies Clerks.

TURTLE FACT OF THE DAY

Diamondback Terrapins are considered "brackish." That means they live in somewhat salty water, but not in oceans. It's somewhere between salty and fresh, and it's more of a salinity issue than salt content. Despite being considered "brackish" dbt's are always spawned up river along fresh water. All dbt's start their life off as fresh water turtles but never make the change to brackish until they are introduced to that type of water. A dbt can live very nicely in fresh water his entire life. I keep mine in fresh water and they are just as happy as the rest.

BUT...

Once you introduce a dbt to brackish water, they will require that environment FOREVER. Here's the process, they hatch with the ability to produce their own salt, eg, for their eyes, etc. but once they are exposed to the salt, their bodies automatically shut down salt production. So once they are in brackish conditions they can NEVER go back to fresh water for any length of time. They WILL suffer and can die the same way you would if your systems ran out of salt.