A fellow turtle-lover send me this discouraging article about the overharvesting of wild turtles in Asia.
Controlled harvesting of eastern America's Diamondback Terrapin continues today. It's a wonder to me, because I know nobody who eats them. This handsome turtle of salt marshes and brackish estuaries lives from MA to Texas, but is endangered in some states.
They eat snails, small mollusks, and crustaceans like crabs and fiddler crabs that they crush with their beaks. Fish, if they can catch 'em. They only leave the water to lay eggs. They sometimes get ensnared in crab pots and drown.
Whenever we went to Chinatown when I was young, I would always bring a box and some money to buy as many of the terrapins that I could afford from the big crates full of them on the sidewalk. I think they were $5 apiece. I would release them in a couple of good salt marshes in CT. My Dad would chip in a bit for the cause.
Some good folks are farming them to restore populations from which they had been harvested to extinction. That is a wonderful mission.
Readers know we love our turtles at Maggie's, except we do not love Snapping Turtles. I once stepped on the back of one in a marsh, thinking it was a mossy rock. Big surprise when it moved and a long neck with an open, hissing mouth shot out. It's time I did a post on them, though, unloveable as they are.
Terrapins in Massachusetts
The oyster farmers get out onto the mudflats at low tide, with their trucks and boats, to tend their oyster cages or to harvest the humble but tasty Wellfleet Oyster: One of many vast Wellfleet salt marshes. These are happy homes fo
Tracked: Sep 23, 19:04
The oyster farmers get out onto the mudflats at low tide, with their trucks and boats, to tend their oyster cages or to harvest the humble but tasty Wellfleet Oyster: One of many vast Wellfleet salt marshes. These are happy homes fo
Tracked: Jun 22, 18:14