Turtles constantly beg for food, especially when you come into sight. Does that mean they are hungry? Here is how often to feed a red-eared slider. 

If you have ever wanted to know how often to feed a red-eared slider, here’s the quick and short answer.

How often should you feed a red-eared slider?

You can feed a red-eared slider once daily, however what you are feeding it depends on how old your turtle is. Younger red-eared babies and juveniles should eat protein daily, whereas older sliders should eat primarily a vegetable-based diet. 

As a red-eared slider owner, I can tell you that their appetite is huge!

I could literally feed giant handfuls of tender filet mignon steak to my slider 3x a day and it would still appear to be starving as I gave it a 4th serving.

Red Eared Slider Diet

As omnivores, a Red Eared Slider’s Diet consist of food from both animal and plant sources. In the wild, Red Eared Sliders usually eat aquatic plants, small fish, crawfish, and worms. A pet Red Eared Slider’s diet should consist of around 25% pellets, 50% vegetables, and 25% mealworms/fish/shrimp.

If you have other species of turtles, you should check out my general guide on how often should I feed my turtle?

Red-eared slider food list

Below are the 4 main food choices that I feed my Red-Eared Slider. As mentioned earlier, older sliders will likely need more vegetable based food while younger sliders need more protein.

	My Top Pick Tetra Tetrafauna Pro Turtle Food	Price: ~$10 Nutrition: High Protein and Vitamin D3	Check Price On Amazon
	Aquatic Turtle Medley Food - Freeze Dried Shrimp & Mealworms for Aquatic Turtle	Price: ~$15 Nutrition: High Protein and Fiber	Check Price On Amazon
	Fluker’s Buffet Blend Turtle Food	Price: ~$8 Nutrition: High Protein and Vitamin A	Check Price On Amazon
	Zoo Med Natural Aquatic Turtle Food	Price: ~$15 Nutrition: High Protein and Vitamin C, D3, E	Check Price On Amazon

How Often To Feed A Red-Eared Slider

Once you have estimated your turtle’s age, then you can determine an optimal feeding schedule. You will typically feed a hatchling and juvenile turtle at least once a day. Adult Red Eared Sliders only need to be fed every other day.

Here is how often I would recommend feeding a Red Eared Slider.

How often to feed red eared slider?

Hatchling and Juvenile red-eared sliders should be fed everyday, while adults can be fed every other day.

Adults

• Vegetables should make up the bulk of their diet, and the older they get, the less protein they will need. You should feed an adult red eared slider vegetables every other day or at least 3 times a week.
• Offer them a protein source once or twice a week. You can gradually reduce their protein to once a week the older they get.

Why Is My Turtle Always Hungry?

There is a reason your turtle always appears to be hungry.

The reason is that in the wild, a red-eared slider is an opportunistic eater. They do not get the luxury of eating pellets, dried shrimp or mealworms in a relatively small aquarium where their prey cannot easily escape. In the wild, they are left with primarily aquatic vegetation, insects and the occasional stray fish that happens to come near as well as decaying organic matter from dead fish or frogs.

If your turtle doesn’t eat whatever is in front of it, it doesn’t eat period!

Thus, it is important that you ignore your turtle’s pleas and begs for food. It’s just being itself and it doesn’t know any better. 

Like I wrote above, you can absolutely feed your red-eared slider every single day or most days of the week, but what you will feed it will be based on how old your turtle is. 

This presents a problem because even if you have bought your red-eared slider from someone else or a pet store, you aren’t likely to know its exact age unless you have brought it up since it was born.

That’s OK because you just need a rough estimate.

If you want to save money on turtle food, I recommend checking out this Buffet Blend Turtle Food.

How Old Is My Red-Eared Slider Turtle?

Here’s the thing, you aren’t going to be able to precisely determine your red-eared slider’s age unless you have taken care of it since it was born.

This isn’t a problem at all though, as we just need to figure out a good estimate.

Now some people say that you can figure out a turtle’s age based on the number of rings on its scutes, but this is a poor method for red-eared sliders as you can’t really see them. Moreover, the method itself is very problematic.

Here is what I suggest.

Loosely determine the age of your turtle based on the size of its turtle shell, and to a lesser extent, the coloring.

To measure its shell, take some measuring tape or a ruler and measure from the top of its shell just behind its head down to the middle of the bottom of its shell. You aren’t measuring its width, but its length here.

Hatchling	Juvenile	Adult
Less than 6 months old	6 months to 2 years old	Older than 2 years
Shell length usually around 2 inches (5-6 centimeters)	Shell length closer but usually not exceeding 4 inches (~10 centimeters)	Shell length more than 4 inches, steadily increasing to 8 to 12 inches (20 to 30 centimeters)
Skin and shell are both very green, light and bright	Shell will turn a deeper shade of green	Shell will be much more black and brown, especially after 4-5 years

Basically, you will want to kind of figure out if your turtle is:

• A hatchling (less than 6 months).
• A juvenile (6 months to 2 years).
• An adult (2 years+).

This will determine how often you feed your turtle a protein source.

Best turtle food for red eared slider

Here are some options for the best vegetables and proteins for red eared sliders:

In the past, I have had turtles that will not eat fresh vegetables. I found the best alternative to fresh vegetables was the Zilla vegetable and fruit mix.

You can feed red-eared sliders fresh fruit, but it shouldn’t be fed daily.

I recommend using some type of aquatic pellet as your main protein staple, as this will ensure that your turtle gets an adequate amount of protein and other minerals and vitamins. A lot of other protein sources are actually devoid of nutritional content.

It is important to feed a red eared slider vegetables that have a lot of calcium. This can help prevent red eared slider shell rot.

Avoid These Red-Eared Slider Foods

For treats and to round-out their diet, I would recommend the following:

For vegetable sources, a handful of romaine lettuce daily will do. If it’s too much they will simply stop eating it. It’s quite difficult for red-eared sliders to gorge on vegetables.

For protein sources, I would advise you to give them enough food that would fit into the size of their head was it empty.

Red-Eared Slider Feeding Schedule

Although this is the feeding schedule that I would recommend, there is an alternative, which is to feed them slightly less protein but to feed them daily.

Personally, I don’t really like this feeding schedule because I feel that it’s a little bit easier to overfeed them, but it’s just an alternative. You will want to avoid overfeeding your red-eared slider as this can cause a host of health problems, and can also lead to premature death.

As your turtle gets older, I would also recommend you to take a day out of the week (usually Sunday for me) and not feed them. This will give whatever is in their stomach some time to digest and give their stomachs a bit of a break. It will not hurt them and in my opinion, it helps prevent overeating.

Lastly, when feeding them, always make sure to keep on eye on your water temperature.

Try to keep it in the 70’s throughout the year. Closer to 80 for younger turtles and closer to 70 for older turtles.

You will have to be careful with this, as red-eared sliders need to be in the water in order to eat (they do not produce saliva), and if the water temperature gets too low, such as into the 50s, this can lead to respiratory disease and other illnesses. If the water gets even lower, the turtle will not be able to properly digest its food.

Summary

To summarize how often to feed a red-eared slider:

• You can feed your turtle daily.
• Hatchlings can be fed protein daily.
• Juveniles can fed protein every other day.
• Adult turtles should be fed once or twice a week, less as they age.
• In order to figure out how often to feed your turtle, you will need to determine how old it is. You can do this by measuring the length of its shell and by looking at its coloring.
• Pellets should make up the bulk of its protein sources.
• As red-eared sliders age, they should be fed more and more vegetables and less and less protein.

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