how would a person know the age and sex of his turtle?!?!?

Question

does color, number of spots, or the size indicates the age or the sex of a turtle?!?

Answer 1

It is hard to sex a turtle when it is young but once a
slider gets older other features come into play .
Males : longer claws , they use this to stroke the
face of the female when they are trying to court her .
Their plastrons ( underside of the turtle ) tend to
cave in . This allows them to sit on top of the female
during mating . Their tails too are longer and fatter
to help them balance during mating .
Females : short front claws . Females of the same age
as males tend to be BIGGER than the males . If you
have more than one turtle of the same age and one
starts growing faster than the others chances are that
MAY be a female . Cloaca located nearer to the shell

If they are wild turtles it is almost impossible to tell the age for sure. Domestic ones are a little bit easier but not by much. Domestic turtles will grow faster than their wild counter parts. The best you can do is identify the turtle species and look up their max (normal) size and guess from there. Size is measuring the carapace (top shell) length from front to back. Counting the rings will not give you an accurate number. They grow a ring with each growth spurt, and if it is a good season or young turtle they can have between two and four rings added in just a few months. If it is a bad season or an older turtle they may only add one ring in a whole year. So it really comes down to an educated guess unless you know for sure when the turtle was hatched.

Answer 2

The shell and skin pattern do not help with age or sex directly.

Age: The only accurate way is to watch it be born. A very rough approximation can be made by looking at the rings on the belly shell scales. Count the strongest rings, and average them over a few scales. Note- this method can be off by many years!

Sex: Turtles under the age of maturity (about 4 years for many pond turtles) are hard to sex. The most common signs for most species are:
- Males have in-curved bellies with long thin tails with the vent opening in about the middle.
- Females have flat or out-curved bellies with short wide tails and the vent near the base.

For more info, try http://www.austinsturtlepage.com

Answer 3

the best way to tell the gender of a turtle is to examin its plastron (bottom of shell) on males this will be concave, on females it will be flat. Generally males have larger tails and longer claws but size is subjective so go with the plastron. Age is hard to tell, you can try to tell by the size and number of chips and scares on the shell but this is very unacurate.