Sexing Your Box Turtle

Hiya, hope you're all doing well.

A couple of weeks ago, we got a nice little surprise.  While watching reptile videos, we came across one talking about turtles.  Inspired to do some research on them again, we came across the sexting materials we looked at a couple years ago, when we first got Fred.

Guess what!  Fred is a girl!  O.O

Yep, that's right.  Our young ornate box turtle, is actually a girl.  We thought she was a he, giving 'him' the name Fred and all.

Weeeeell, no.  We were wrong.  Now that our little goofball is a little older, we can better tell what the *ahem* parts are, and correctly tell the gender.

With turtles (box turtles, anyway) there are several easy ways to tell:

1.  The eyes.  Females have brown eyes, males have red eyes.  It's a noticeable difference, too.  Like, chocolate brown vs. tomato red.

2. The bottom of the shells: females have flat shell bottoms, while males have a noticeable concave shape (scooped inward a bit) which helps with mating, apparently.
*Ornates are harder to tell, because the males have nearly flat shells on the bottom, so don't use this as a determining factor, if you have an ornate box turtle.  That was the mistake we made, haha.

3. The feet are quite different.  The length of the claws, and shape of the feet.  The back toe on the males are thicker and curved, almost like small talons. The female back toes are thinner and straighter.

4.  The tales.  Females have their "hole" further inward, almost inside the shell, while the male holes are further outward.  Males also have longer tales, while females have shorter, almost stubby tales.

*Helpful hint: you can age a turtle by counting the ridges on their shells.  If you look closely, you can see ridges, and they look somewhat like a tree.  Each ridge is about a year, so 15 ridges would mean the turtle is around 15 years old or so.

So, yeah.  We have re-named our little box turtle girl.  We chose, Betty! :D

Fred Betty is quite happy, and is growing slowly =)