Painted Turtle

The painted turtle is North America's most widespread native turtle, living in slow-moving fresh waters from southern Canada to northern Mexico and from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Adults are 13 to 25 cm long, with a smooth dark upper shell and olive to black skin striped with red, orange or yellow on the limbs. It eats aquatic vegetation, algae and small water creatures such as insects, crustaceans and fish, and basks for hours on logs or rocks by day. In winter it brumates, usually in mud at the bottom of the water. Adults in the wild can live for more than 55 years.

About the painted turtle

The painted turtle is a small freshwater turtle with a smooth, dark shell and red, orange or yellow stripes on its skin. It belongs to the pond turtle family, Emydidae, and is North America's most widespread native turtle, living in ponds and marshes from southern Canada to northern Mexico and from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Its scientific name, Chrysemys picta, mixes Greek and Latin: chrysemys means "gold freshwater tortoise" and picta means "colored." There are three subspecies: the eastern (C. p. picta), midland (C. p. marginata) and western (C. p. bellii). The southern painted turtle, once a fourth subspecies, is now generally treated as a separate species, Chrysemys dorsalis. Painted turtle fossils from Nebraska date back about 15 million years.

Adults are 13 to 25 cm (5 to 10 in) long. The shell is oval, smooth and flat-bottomed, without a ridge down the back. The top shell, or carapace, ranges from olive to black, and darker turtles are more common where the water has a dark bottom. The bottom shell, or plastron, is yellow or sometimes red, often with dark markings in the middle. The skin matches the top shell, with red and yellow stripes on the neck, legs and tail, and the feet are webbed for swimming.

The head is distinctive. The face has only yellow stripes, with a large yellow spot and streak behind each eye, and two wide yellow chin stripes that meet at the tip of the jaw. The upper jaw forms an upside-down V with a tooth-like point on each side. Some of the color comes from diet: carotenoids in algae and water plants brighten the red and yellow stripes.

Females are bigger. They reach 10 to 25 cm (4 to 10 in) and average about 500 g (18 oz), while males reach 7 to 15 cm (3 to 6 in) and about 300 g (11 oz). Males have longer front claws and a longer, thicker tail.

Each subspecies has its own look. The eastern's top-shell plates line up in straight rows across the back, unlike any other North American turtle. The midland has a dark shadow in the center of its bottom shell. The western is the largest, up to 26.6 cm (10 in), with a mesh of light lines on the top shell and a big, often reddish blotch on the bottom shell.

Behavior and diet

Painted turtles are diurnal and run on sunshine. A turtle climbs out at sunrise to bask for several hours, slips back into the water to forage, then repeats the cycle once or twice more. More than 50 may crowd onto one log, and they have even been seen basking on nesting loons. To be active, a painted turtle must keep its body at 17 to 23 °C (63 to 73 °F). At night it sleeps on the bottom or on an underwater perch.

They are bottom-dwelling hunters. A painted turtle jabs its head in and out of water plants to flush prey into open water, then chases it, holding large prey in its mouth while tearing it with the front feet. It also eats plants and skims the surface with its mouth open to catch small food particles. Young turtles are mostly carnivorous and eat more plants as they age. Western painted turtles eat about 60 percent insects in early summer and 55 percent plants in late summer, and they spread white water-lily seeds that pass through their gut intact.

Winter is where the painted turtle shines. It hibernates buried in mud at the bottom of shallow water, often for months under ice. It does not breathe, though it can absorb some oxygen through its skin and cloaca. Instead it relies on a slowed metabolism, big stores of glycogen in its liver, and its shell, which has the highest carbonate content recorded in any animal and soaks up the lactic acid that builds up without oxygen. Western painted turtles can survive 170 days without oxygen, midlands 150 days and easterns 125 days.

Courtship happens in spring and fall. The male swims face-to-face with the female and strokes her face and neck with his long front claws. Females store sperm for up to three years. Between late May and mid-July, the female digs a vase-shaped nest in sandy, often south-facing soil, usually within 200 m (220 yd) of water. The eggs hatch in 72 to 80 days, and in the north the hatchlings often spend their first winter in the nest, surviving subfreezing temperatures with blood that can stay supercooled.

The temperature during incubation decides the sex of the young: 23 to 27 °C (73 to 81 °F) produces males, and warmer or cooler temperatures produce females. Males mature at 2 to 4 years and females at 6 to 10, later in the far north.

Eggs and hatchlings face many predators, including raccoons, snakes, crows, foxes, fish, bullfrogs and snapping turtles. Only 19 percent survive their first year, but adult females have a 95 percent annual survival rate.

Range and habitat

The painted turtle is the only turtle whose native range reaches from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It is native to eight Canadian provinces, 45 U.S. states and one Mexican state, and it lives farther north than any other American turtle, thanks partly to its hatchlings' ability to survive winter in the nest.

The eastern subspecies runs from southeastern Canada to Georgia, east of the Appalachians. The midland lives from southern Ontario and Quebec through the eastern Midwest to Tennessee and Alabama. The western covers southern western Canada and the northern Great Plains to the Pacific Northwest, with scattered populations in the Southwest and one river in northern Mexico. It is not native to Nevada or California.

All three need fresh water with soft bottoms, basking sites and water plants. Western painted turtles also use pasture ponds and roadside pools, as high as 1,800 m (5,900 ft). In good habitat densities range from 10 to 840 turtles per hectare (2.5 acres) of water.

Painted turtle vs red-eared slider

The painted turtle is easy to confuse with the red-eared slider, the most common pet turtle.

Conservation status

The painted turtle is listed as Least Concern on the IUCN Red List (van Dijk, 2011, with 2016 errata) and ranked G5, demonstrably widespread, by NatureServe. Within much of its range it is the most abundant turtle, helped by a high reproductive rate and a tolerance for polluted wetlands and artificial ponds.

Numbers have still fallen since European settlement, and some local populations are in trouble. In Oregon it is ranked imperiled, and in British Columbia only a few thousand remain. Threats include drained wetlands and lost basking and nesting sites, roadkill (especially of nesting females), introduced bass, bullfrogs and snapping turtles that eat hatchlings, competition from released pet red-eared sliders, pollution and over-collection. Minnesota banned commercial turtle trapping in 2023, and Wisconsin ended commercial harvesting in 1997.