As eggs and hatchlings, snapping turtles are vulnerable to predators. Like any wild animal, they will defend themselves, especially on land where they are less comfortable and more likely to encounter people. Their jaws are sharp and powerful and they will bite if hurt or threatened. If you see a snapping turtle, your best option is to leave it alone. If you can, stay a safe distance away and act like a crossing guard so she can carefully make her way across.
If there is traffic, try gently hurrying her along with a blunt object in the direction she is heading. Slow and steady wins the race! Do not attempt to pick up a snapping turtle, especially by the tail! Their long necks can reach back and their bite is painful. While continued habitat destruction could imperil snapping turtles in the future, populations are currently stable and they are not considered endangered or threatened. Never take a wild animal as a pet!
Many turtles carry a bacterium called salmonella that can easily transfer to humans, so if you do touch one, be sure to wash your hands immediately after. While snapping turtles can be kept in captivity, they require an experienced aquarist to take care of them. While you cannot determine the exact age of a snapping turtle based on these ridges, it is reasonable to assume that any turtle who has a smooth carapace is at least a few years old. Some hatchlings bear small white dots on their shells, but these tend to disappear with age.
In practice, this is only helpful for verifying that a turtle with such spots is rather young, though its size would communicate this fact. Young turtles, who have not put their shells through this much wear and tear, tend to have shells that lack this polished look. By using the site, you agree to the uses of cookies and other technology as outlined in our Policy, and to our Terms of Use. How to Identify a Terrapin Turtle.
They were present when dinosaurs lived and died, and had been laying round, white, leathery eggs in sandy loam and glacial till for millions of years when the first Amerindians wandered over the Bering Land Bridge.
Snapping turtles have witnessed the drift of continents, the birth of islands, the drowning of coastlines, the rise and fall of mountain ranges, the spread of prairies and deserts, the comings and goings of glaciers.
They range across southern Canada from Alberta to Nova Scotia, throughout the eastern two-thirds of America from the apron of the Rocky Mountains east to the tidewater Atlantic, and south to the Gulf Coast and the Mexican tributaries of the Rio Grande. Two sibling species dwell in the tropics—one ranging from the Atlantic lowlands of Vera Cruz, Mexico, to Honduras, and the other from Nicaragua south through Caribbean Central America to the Pacific coast of Colombia and Ecuador. Like their northern cousin, both species seek mud-bottomed, weed-choked wetlands, and are opportunistic feeders, dining on whatever is available: carrion, aquatic invertebrates, fish, amphibians, other turtles, small mammals, snakes, the occasional bird ducklings usually , and all manner of aquatic plants, which may make up more than half their diet.
When I was growing up on Long Island, suburban legend claimed that a large, hatchet-faced snapping turtle—common in streams, sumps, and tidal marshes along the South Shore—could break a broom handle in one bite. Years later I tested the hypothesis, which proved false. Snapping turtles, whose jaws are more clamps than guillotines, do occasionally take birds. Why were the birds riled? In late summer, when lake shallows heat up, large submerged mats of filamentous green algae rise off the bottom and drift.
Teeming with invertebrates and small fish, the mats are a floating buffet for migrating shorebirds. Snapping turtles, classic ambush predators, lurk beneath the algae pulling hapless sandpipers through by their feet, an event the author witnessed on three occasions.
Once when I was in northern Virginia, a biologist friend told me of a snapping turtle that grabbed a great blue heron by the leg and then towed the protesting bird into deep water. The turtle sank to the bottom—part anchor, part vise grip—drowning the heron, which it presumably ate. I visited the lake and found several sink-sized turtles sprawled on the surface sunbathing, as though they had bubbled up from the depths like the Lake Ontario algae mats. Carroll is coiffed in gray from chin to crown, casual and energetic, a man who feels deeply about turtles and the fate of their diminishing habitat in the Northeast.
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