Study shows commercial harvest of snapping turtles is leading to population decline
Crawling through neck-high mud on riverbanks is a dirty job, but someone has to do it for the sake of Virginia’s snapping turtles.
That task falls on Benjamin Colteaux, a Ph.D. candidate in Virginia Commonwealth University’s Integrative Life Sciences program, and other members of “Team Snapper” working in the lab of Derek Johnson, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Biology in the College of Humanities and Sciences.
For four years, the researchers spent several weeks at a time trekking through muddy turtle turf to catch and tag the animals, and record indices of health and growth for multiple studies on the impacts of wild turtle harvesting.
“Some would say it’s disgusting and messy, but for my team and me it’s been a blast!” Colteaux said.
Team Snapper has documented the extent of snapping turtle population decline due to skyrocketing rates of harvesting in Virginia�a trend also occurring in other states. Three tributaries of the Mattaponi, Chickahominy and Rappahannock rivers served as study sites with harvest levels ranging from zero to almost 50 percent of the snapping turtle population.
More than 200,000 wild snapping turtles were harvested across the United States in 2012 and 2014, Colteaux said, a dramatic increase from the nearly 50,000 harvested cumulatively from 1999 to 2011.
Click the link to read more and watch the researchers crawl through mud…
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Photo from Team Snapper .
