For reptile and amphibian keepers with Aquatic or Semi-Aquatic environments, just as important as building the right home and feeding the right food is knowing the right things to do to create healthy water for your pets.
One rule of thumb is that untreated tap water is unsafe for aquatic or semi-aquatic pets because it contains chemicals like chlorine, chloramines, and heavy metals. You can achieve good water quality with a combination of water treatment and filtration that’s properly sized for your aquatic environment.
Water Treatments
Tetrafauna AquaSafe® for Reptiles allows you to treat tap water quickly, neutralizing harmful chlorine, chloramines, and heavy metals such as copper, iron, and zinc. It contains unique colloids that protect skin and is designed to be safe for use with fragile amphibians such as frogs, newts, and salamanders. AquaSafe® for Reptiles is also appropriate for aquatic turtles, snakes, lizards, and all ornamental fish.
If you ha ve an aquatic area in your environment for tropical fish, also add SafeStart® Plus. It contains live bacteria to reduce dangerous ammonia and nitrite levels in your new tank, so you can safely add your fish right away.
Tetrafauna ReptoGuard™ is a time-release sulfa block for turtles that helps control disease-causing organisms (like salmonella) to keep pets and owners safe.
Filtration
You’ll need to filter your water, even if it’s shallow. Your filter should be three stage––providing mechanical, chemical, and biological filtration to remove waste, debris, discoloration, odors, and ammonia.
Tetrafauna offers a variety of filters appropriate for set-ups of all sizes. They all use Whisper® filtration technology, a three-stage filtration system designed to handle any of your filtration needs.
Keep in mind some aquatic reptiles produce a lot of waste, especially turtles, so frequent water changes are recommended. We recommend weekly water changes of 25% for fish/newt/frog environments and weekly changes of 50% for turtles.