Complete Guide To The Painted Turtle

How to Find Painted Turtles

• Painted Turtles are widely distributed across North Carolina and throughout the southeast.
• They are very easy to spot in almost any large, slow-moving or still body of freshwater in the state that has muddy bottoms and lots of aquatic vegetation.
• Look for them basking in in the sun on rocks or logs through the day, spring through fall.
  • If you happen to be in a kayak or canoe (something very quiet—not a power boat) in shallow water, peer down into the water when you see muddy bottom and underwater plants. You have a great chance of spotting one of these reptiles foraging mere feet from your boat if you don’t approach too aggressively and scare them away.

Basking

• Painted Turtles bask out of water in the sun for several hours in the morning to warm themselves before they begin to forage for food underwater.
  • Periodically, individual turtles emerge climb out of the water for additional bouts of basking later in the day.
  • As reptiles, Painted Turtles rely on warmth from the sun because they have limited ability to maintain their own body temperature.
  • Their metabolism and physical functioning slows when they are too cold.
  • Painted Turtles bask extensively, especially during spring when their ponds or lakes still maintain distinct layers of warm and cold water.
• In my experience, Painted Turtles hold their ground while basking, and only plunk into the water when approached quite closely.
  • In this way, Painted Turtles differ from other North Carolina pond turtle species in family Emydidae, which seem much quicker to abandon their basking sites when approached.

Surviving The Winter Without Oxygen

Even though Painted Turtles spend most of their time in the water, they are reptiles and reptiles must breathe air—normally. But turtles are amazing creatures that have evolved several ways to survive many months of being unable to breathe at all.

And Painted Turtles perform this feat better than almost any other freshwater turtle know.

When the weather is warm, and freshwater turtles are active, they alternate diving down under water to forage for food and rising to the surface to breathe. But because their body temperatures depend on ambient temperature, they hibernate through the winter.

When temperatures drop in late fall, individual Painted Turtles dive to the pond bottom and work themselves several feet down into the soft mud. Their metabolic rate drops so far that they no longer need to breathe air into their lungs.

Painted Turtles lay buried—hidden and quiet—through the long winter months and stir only when water temperatures rise. They sometimes emerge for a few days during winter warm spells, only to retreat once again under the mud when cold temperatures return.

But how do they do this? How can they stay buried in mud, under several feet of water, for entire months without needing to breathe?

Painted Turtles evolved the ability to survive two, normally fatal, consequences of prolonged breath holding: lack of oxygen and lactic acid build-up. Painted Turtles do this by:

• Drastically slowing their metabolisms so they require less energy to stay alive,
• Switching from an oxygen-based metabolism that burns fat for energy to one that burns carbohydrate in the absence of oxygen,
• Releasing calcium and magnesium from their shells to neutralize lactic acid before it reaches fatal levels, and
• Buffering and sequestering lactic acid into their shells (Jackson 2013).