Pig Nosed Turtles and Successful Pond Keeping & Breeding in Humpty Doo

At times you get the most fascinating stories about pond keeping from around the world. A few weeks ago we had a tale and photos of fish eating spiders and today from Humpty Doo (what a great name) we have the first time breeding in captivity of Pig-Nosed Turtles. Greg also sent me some great photos with amazing clarity (these pictures do not do justice in view of need to reduce resolution for web)

Hello Anthony Thanks for your record breaking 4 emails. I too stayed home over Easter.

I read all your info with interests but I am happy to say that my ponds are going swimmingly at the moment. 
Every morning I am greeted by 7 hungry Pig Nosed Turtles demanding to be fed whilst swimming in very clear and clean water.

My main pond is 120,000 litres and has two filter types. One is a 10,000 litre water tank full of bundled shade cloth. Over this is a fixed spray bar delivering 7,000 litre per hour( And you are quite right about problems with water chanelling problems with overhead spray bars - but I can't see any alternative. And my water is very good anyway.

The second type of filtertion is a shallow pond (18 meters X 5 meters X 0.8 meters) half full of aquatic aquatic vegetation. This draws out a lot of nutrients before going into the filter tank. I run just 2  x 120 watt pond pumps rated at 16,000 litres per hour.

One simply moves water around the system and the second pumps up into the filter tank (and is reduced from 16K to 7 K per hour in the process.

My pond are used for two purposes:

1 to breed the turtles (which are only found in a handful of rivers in north Australia and Papua New Guinea) and as a family swimming pool.

This is the first time that this turtle has been bred in captivity anywhere in the world.

It does both jobs very well. Pics attached 

Cheers Greg Miles

Humpty Doo

Northern Territory

Australia
 

Greg... thanks a lot. What superb photos. I'd never heard of a pig nosed turtle. So long as your filter is working well I wouldn't worry about anything else. I'll publish your story on my site later today