About Turtle Times

Turtle Times has been online in some form since 2003. The original site was a community for North American turtle keepers — a vBulletin forum, a monthly photo contest, classifieds for trading captive-bred animals, and a growing library of care sheets. The forum is gone (we explain why on our Q&A archive), but the spirit of the original site — experienced keepers helping new keepers — is what we’ve rebuilt the current Turtle Times around.

This page is who we are now, what we cover, and how to reach us.

What Turtle Times covers

We’re an information site for turtle and tortoise keepers, focused on practical husbandry rather than the academic side. We write detailed care guides for the species most commonly kept in the western pet trade, we answer reader questions in long-form, and we maintain hub pages that work as starting points for new owners. The four pillars of the site:

Beyond those four hubs, we publish species-specific guides (sliders, painteds, musks, maps, cooters, mud, snake-necks, softshells, box, terrapin and the rest), plus a steadily-growing reader-question archive covering the issues that come up most often in our inbox.

Meet the team

The byline at the bottom of each post is real. We’re a small group with a mix of decades of hands-on keeping experience between us. Most of us joined Turtle Times after spending years answering the same questions on other forums and realising the answers deserved permanent homes.

Tom — lead editor, aquatic species

Twelve years keeping red-eared sliders, eight years with painteds, and a brief and disastrous attempt at a cooter pond in the back garden which Marcus still won’t let him forget. Tom writes most of the species overview and tank-setup guides. He’s the one who’ll reply if you email about indoor aquatic setups, filtration, or anything to do with sliders, painteds, cooters, maps, or musks.

Linda — veterinary background, health and feeding

Came to turtle keeping through a veterinary-technician role at an exotics-focused practice in the early 2000s. Now writes most of the medical and dietary content on the site. If your email mentions shell rot, respiratory infection, refusal to eat, vitamin A deficiency, MBD, or any feeding question, Linda’s the one who’ll write back. She’s also the team’s reluctant rule-enforcer on “is this supplement safe” questions.

Marcus — tortoises and outdoor pens

Hermann’s and Russian tortoises in outdoor pens for over fifteen years, plus a long-running Sulcata that has comprehensively destroyed three garden fences. Marcus covers tortoise-specific husbandry, outdoor pen construction, brumation, and the Mediterranean vs tropical tortoise diet split. If your animal is land-dwelling and you’re sending photos of the enclosure, Marcus is the one who’ll reply.

Priya — softshells and side-necks

A specialist’s specialist. Eight years keeping Florida softshells, an Eastern snake-necked turtle named Lurch, and a small spiny softshell that turned out to be unusually social. Priya answers everything to do with the Pleurodira side-necks (snake-necked, mata mata, side-necks) and the softshell turtles. Less common species, smaller user base, longer email threads.

Jenna — new-owner triage

Jenna runs the first response on most contact-form emails. If you’re a brand-new keeper, you’ll usually hear from her first — she’ll work out which member of the team to route your specific question to, ask for the photos and setup details we need, and often answer the question outright if it’s in our existing FAQ archive. She also writes most of our new-owner content.

How we work

Every post on Turtle Times is written by one of the named team members and signed at the bottom of the article. We don’t accept guest posts or sponsored content, and we don’t carry affiliate links to specific brands. The site’s funded by reasonable display advertising; we don’t let that influence what we recommend.

Our editorial standards:

  • Hands-on experience first. Every species we cover at depth is one a team member has kept personally. Where we’re writing about a species we don’t keep ourselves (sea turtles, leatherbacks, critically endangered species) we say so.
  • Vet input on health content. Linda has the veterinary background; medical recommendations are run past her before publication. We always recommend consulting a reptile-experienced exotics vet for active health problems.
  • Evidence over folklore. Turtle keeping has accumulated a lot of inherited misconceptions over the decades. We try to flag where common advice (compact UVB bulbs, salt baths, fish-only diets) is outdated.
  • Update older posts. Our oldest articles go back to 2020. We re-read and update the highest-traffic ones every quarter to keep the recommendations current.

What happened to the old forum, classifieds and photo contest?

The original 2003-era Turtle Times had three community features that ran for many years: a vBulletin forum, a classifieds section for buying and selling captive-bred animals, and a long-running monthly photo contest with prizes. All three are now archived rather than active — the forum software became unmaintainable and migrating two decades of discussion was beyond what we could responsibly take on.

What replaced them:

  • Forum → the reader-question archive. Submit questions via the contact form and we publish the answers as full articles. Slower than a forum but the answers are higher quality and stay findable.
  • Classifieds → our guide to ethical sources. We don’t broker sales but we maintain a vetted list of breeders we trust.
  • Photo contest → the Herpetology Pictures archive. Reader-submitted photos still welcome via email — we add the best ones to species pages with credit.

Contact

The fastest way to reach the team is via our contact form. We aim to reply within 48 hours; faster for anything flagged urgent.

For media enquiries, syndication, or general site questions, the same form works — flag “media” or “site” in the subject line and it’ll be routed to the right place.

We do not publish email addresses on the public site (the spam volume is unmanageable). The contact form goes to the same shared inbox.

Where to find us elsewhere

  • Twitter — quick updates and occasional reader photo retweets.
  • Facebook — community discussion, links to new articles.
  • Pinterest — care sheets and identification charts.

If you’ve been a Turtle Times reader for any length of time — from the 2003 forum days, the 2010s pet-resource phase, or the current iteration — thank you for sticking with us. We’re a small site with a long tail, and most of what we do gets done because readers email questions and tell us when we’re wrong.

— The Turtle Times team. Tom, Linda, Marcus, Priya, Jenna.

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