About Box Turtles

Box Turtles is a small, independent team of keepers, a herper, and an exotic‑vet tech who write about box turtles, terrapins, sliders, tortoises, and the rest of the chelonian world the way we actually keep and study them. No filler, no algorithmic listicles, no AI‑generated species pages. Every care sheet you read here comes from someone who has hosed out an enclosure that morning.

Who we are

We started this site as a personal scratchpad back in 2012. One of us had just taken in a rescue ornate box turtle from a local reptile group, and the half‑finished forum posts we kept across three browser tabs were starting to embarrass us. So we made a website. Then a few more keepers asked if they could write for it. Thirteen years on, we are still small, still independent, and still a little obsessive about getting the species names right.

The byline on most posts is one of four people:

Maya — lead keeper

Maya keeps a mixed indoor/outdoor colony of Terrapene and a single Coahuilan she rehomed in 2017. She studied wildlife biology, did two seasons of field volunteering with a state DNR turtle survey, and is the person who insists every care sheet on this site shows real substrate depths in centimetres, not a vibe. If a post talks about hides, lighting strips, soaking schedules, or hibernation prep, Maya probably wrote it.

Ben — exotic‑vet tech

Ben works in a small exotic‑animal clinic and sees the consequences of bad husbandry every week — respiratory infections, shell rot, vitamin A deficiencies, parasite blooms. Ben is who we make read every health post before it goes live. If the article you are reading has a section that starts with “when to call a vet” and it is unusually specific, that is Ben.

Hannah — herper and field volunteer

Hannah is the one who has actually waded through a Florida swamp at 2 am counting Terrapene carolina bauri for a county atlas. She writes our wild‑population, taxonomy, and conservation pieces, and she is the person who reminds the rest of us that collecting wild box turtles is illegal in most US states, and that the species was uplisted to IUCN Vulnerable in 2011. We say this a lot on this site because it matters.

Drew — junior keeper

Drew got his first box turtle in 2023 and is still the newest set of eyes on the team. When something on a care sheet is jargon, Drew is the one who pushes back and asks us to explain it. We think that is good for the site. If a beginner‑oriented piece feels less stiff than the rest, that is Drew’s edit.

What we actually do

We write three kinds of content, in this order of priority:

1. Care sheets for the species and subspecies people actually keep — Eastern, Three‑Toed, Florida, Ornate, Gulf Coast, Desert, Chinese, Malayan, McCord’s, plus all the common Cuora and a handful of more obscure Asian species. Each one is rebuilt every couple of years against current literature.
2. Species and taxonomy explainers — what is a box turtle vs a tortoise, why “terrapin” means different things on different sides of the Atlantic, why the 2013 Martin et al. paper mattered.
3. Health and husbandry deep‑dives — humidity, UVB, soaking, dystocia, MBD, shell rot, vet visits, hibernation, and the unromantic question of how much it actually costs to keep one of these animals well for forty years.

We also keep a small reading list of books we actually own and use, and we occasionally review a product we have spent at least a season testing.

How we research

We try to follow a simple rule: a claim on Box Turtles should be traceable to either a peer‑reviewed paper, a recognised herpetological society publication, a government wildlife agency, a vet, or one of our own enclosures. If it cannot be traced to any of those, we either go and verify it or we leave it out. We link out to non‑competing primary sources — IUCN Red List assessments, US Fish & Wildlife species pages, the IUCN Red List directly, and the USFWS species database.

We do not link to other commercial care‑content sites, because they tend to recycle each other’s mistakes, and following that chain is how the internet ends up insisting that box turtles “love” lettuce. (They do not. Romaine is mostly water.)

What this site is not

We are not a forum. We are not a rescue (though we will always point you to one — please contact your state herpetological society or a vet rather than releasing a captive box turtle into the wild). We do not sell turtles, eggs, or hatchlings, and we will not link to anyone who does. We do not write sponsored species pages.

We also do not believe in giving identical care advice for every Terrapene — an Eastern box turtle from coastal Virginia and a Desert box turtle from Chihuahua have wildly different humidity needs, and most “box turtle care” articles online quietly average those two animals into a third species that does not exist.

How we make money

This site is reader‑supported. We run a small number of ads through Google AdSense, and a few of our product reviews include affiliate links — mostly to books and equipment we have personally bought and used. We never recommend anything we have not tested ourselves, and we do not accept paid placements in care sheets. The affiliate and ads disclosure page has the full detail, and the privacy policy covers what cookies the ad network sets.

If you want to write to us

The fastest way to reach the team is the contact page. We read everything, we reply to most things, and we are particularly happy to hear from vets, keepers, and field researchers who think we have something wrong. Corrections that come in with a citation get fixed within a week and the contributor named at the foot of the post.

Thanks for reading. Take it slow with your turtle — they have all the time in the world, and so should you.

— Maya, Ben, Hannah and Drew