Exotic Pets - Baby Matamata Turtle - as part of the expert series by GeoBeats. This is a Matamata. They come from South America, from the Amazon. This is about a 4 month old baby. They get almost 18 inches long when you are full grown. A very unusual turtle. These are designed to live in a leaf litter at the bottom of the shallow streams in the Amazon, and as you can see from the shape of the head and the shape of the shell and the overall shape of the animal, they are primarily camouflage ambush hunters. Very, very pretty on the bottom too. These animals will sit and wait for fish to swim by and then they suck the fish and the water that surrounds it into their mouth. They spit the water back out and swallow the fish. Voracious hunters, voracious feeders. In captivity, a little Matamata like this will go through 50-100 fish a week very easily. They get very, very big, like I said, 18 inches. To keep these in captivity, it is required to have a very shallow tank of water. They are not very good swimmers, so you do not want anything for an animal like this for more than say 6 inches. The water has to be very very very clean, very well filtered with the proper PH which would try to duplicate the Amazon, and then they need to be fed a lot of food. Feeding them just goldfish is not a good idea. They require a variety of food and they need a lot of it. What we like to do is keep them in their shallow water with a filter, and just make sure that we have fish swimming in there to provide them with a meal anytime they like. Very interesting animals, very unusual animals. When these were first discovered back in the 1700s, they actually thought they were turtles that live on land and never came out of the water. The opposite is actually true. Except for laying eggs, these animals rarely ever come out of the water, but spend almost their entire lives underwater using this snorkel-like nose to stick out of the water to breathe. Other than that, they are almost totally aquatic. They are very, very neat but they do get very, very large.