PLEASE- No water or box turtle questions. If you have a question about Red-ear Sliders, Painted Turtles, or other turtles, please try a different expert or http://www.turtleforum.com. It is free and very good.
My specialty is tortoises, especially Red-foot Tortoises. I will gladly try to help with any tortoise-related question I can. I will also help with general questions about things like behavior of wild turtles, etc.
I am not a vet or a breeder, herpetologist, etc. I'm just a guy who studies tortoises. I reserve the right to send you to a website if they have a better answer than I can offer rather than doing long cut-and-pastes, etc. I also will not second guess a vet or recommend home surgery or self-prescribing prescription meds.
Sliders are the genus Trachemys, Cooters are Psuedemys, Painteds are Chrysemys, and Maps are Graptemys and you cannot generally breed across genera lines.
The only crosses that work on this list are the Red-ears and other sliders. Red-ears are Trachemys scripta elegans- a subspecies of the Yellow-Belly Slider Trachemys scripta scripta. Any T. scripta species can, in theory, crossbreed. This includes the Yellow-belly, Red-ear, Venezuelan, Grays, Ornate, Cumberland, and a few others.
Crossing one species of slider with another, such as the Yellow-belly T. scripta with another, like the Brazilian, T. adiutrix is trickier- it MAY work, but not as often and the offspring will not be fertile most of the time.
