These are the river terrapin hatchlings that we are currently rearing at the Head-starting Facility on campus. Like I have mentioned previously, we purchase the river terrapin eggs from the egg collectors from Setiu and then incubated them (the eggs, NOT the collectors, hahhahah) in styrofoam boxes. At the end of the incubation period, the hatchlings will emerge from their eggs.

So upon emergence, I will take care of them until we release them in staggered ages. In fact, my Master’s project is to determine the best head-starting practices to to obtain their optimum growth rate. This includes experimenting with different foods, feeding rations, feeding frequencies, satiation amounts, etc.

So I feed with them with tilapia pellets — commercially-available specially-formulated pellets to culture tilapia fish. These pellets are available in bags of 20kg from Cargill. The tilapia pellets contain 34% protein, if I’m not mistaken, which is a little lower than the frog pellets (which contains 37% protein) that I had also tried out before, but statistics tests did not reveal significant differences in the growth of terrapins fed with both types of pellets.

I am still feeding them with tilapia pellets because they are cheaper (about RM 40 per bag, equivalent to about USD 11) and are more easily available.