SOUTH FLORIDA SUN-SENTINEL (Fort Lauderdale, Florida) 05 January 08 State hopes pet turtles are sliding into history (Sallie James)
If you were hoping to own one of those cute little turtles with the red stripes near their ears, forget it. The state has classified red-eared sliders as a "conditional species" and has banned the sale of the exotic creatures as pets.
The ban makes sense to Jonah Bader, 14, a Parkland ninth-grader who has owned one of the turtles for four years.
"They don't really make good pets," said Bader, who aspires to a career in herpetology, the study of amphibians and reptiles. "But red-eared sliders were the cheapest turtles you could buy as a baby, about $10. But when they get bigger, people release them into the wild."
That's the problem, according to state officials. Too many of them have been released and are inter-breeding with native Florida turtles such as the yellow-bellied slider, said Scott Hardin, exotic species coordinator for the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission in Tallahassee. "You can find yellow-bellied sliders with red ear parts on them," he said.
Barbara DuPont, co-owner of Wild Cargo Pets and Supplies in West Palm Beach, sold about five of the popular red-eared sliders a week until the law went into effect. DuPont said she still sells two versions of red-eared sliders — the albino and pastel — because they are known to be too fragile to survive and breed in the wild.
She said it is legal to sell them, but they aren't popular. Unlike the common red-eared slider which sold at $12.95, the albino and pastel ones sell for $250 each.
Terry Wolf, wildlife director at Lion Country Safari in Loxahatchee, said most biologists take a grim view of invasive species, such as the red-eared sliders, because they tend to compete with native species. Red-eared sliders are faster on land and better swimmers than their local counterparts, such as musk turtles and alligator snapping turtles.
"There's a lot of people who say, look, there's nothing native to Florida," Wolf said. "But as biologists, if you want to preserve the Everglades, you don't want to bring in an invasive species that will crowd out the natives."
For now, people who owned turtles before July 1, 2007, can keep them. But the pets are not allowed to reproduce, and all the eggs must be destroyed. Most pet stores are no longer selling them.
Exotic pets are often status symbols among children and teenagers, who later lose interest, Bader said. "The only reason they get it is to impress their friends," he said. "They get the cheapest animals, which usually grow into the biggest, like the iguanas, the Nile monitors and the tortoises."
Once readily available in pet stores across the state, red eared-sliders can now be sold only for commercial use, such as import/export, and for research, Hardin said. In those instances, buyers must apply for a free permit to possess the turtles through the Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission.
The new law also will make it illegal to own any red-eared sliders smaller than four inches after July 1, 2008. Those younger turtles have been banned for sale since the 1970s, but the rule against owning them was added to ensure that no existing turtle owners are allowing their pets to breed, Hardin said.
"If you have one, either you bought it illegally or your turtle had babies," Hardin said. "They'd be in possession of red-eared sliders forever."
Red-eared sliders are native to the areas around the Mississippi River down to the Gulf of Mexico and can grow as large as 10 inches in diameter. No one knows how many of the turtles are owned as pets in Florida, but Hardin said it's easily in the thousands and likely higher.
"We didn't want to have any genetic contamination of our native species," Hardin said. "Essentially, clamped down on anybody else having a red-eared slider in the future."
The nonprofit Sawgrass Nature Center & Wildlife Hospital in Coral Springs continually fields calls about unwanted red-eared sliders, but the facility has no space for them.
Although encouraged by the new law's intent, center founder Joan Kohl is skeptical about its potential effectiveness.
"I don't know how they will know if someone has just purchased one or if they had it," Kohl said.
State hopes pet turtles are sliding into history

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