EXAMINER ENTERPRISE (Bartlesville, Oklahoma) 07 July 08 Snapping turtles sent up river: Species reintroduced near Hulah Lake (Susan Hylton Tulsa World)
Copan (AP): You won’t see an alligator snapping turtle basking in the sun atop a fallen log in the Caney River.
But they were there on the muddy bottoms, recently, snapping their enormous hooked beaks.
Ninety juvenile alligator snapping turtles were reintroduced up the Caney River from Hulah Lake in an effort to replenish the vanishing population.
Day Ligon, a biology professor at Missouri State University in Springfield, and Brian Fillmore, a biologist at the Tishomingo National Fish Hatchery, pulled each turtle from a tub of beak-pierced bags.
Each turtle was placed in the water by hand, and almost all sank like lead.
“They’re not aggressive at all,” Ligon said.
Just don’t put your finger in front of one’s mouth or you could lose it.
A few times, a turtle would resurface briefly and then vanish in a bubbly descent.
Rebecca Fillmore of the Tishomingo Fish Hatchery, Dan Moore, a graduate student at Oklahoma State University, and Jeff Haas, the manager of the Sequoyah National Wildlife Refuge, helped note the water’s depth and temperature.
Ligon said the team would conduct sampling next spring to see how the turtles are doing and how much they’ve grown. Each turtle has a tag in one of its hind legs. With the wave of a scanner, the turtle can be identified.
Brian Fillmore said that the only habitats that still exist for the turtles in Oklahoma are at the Sequoyah National Wildlife Refuge and Lake Eufaula.
Adults of the species were taken to the Tishomingo Fish Hatchery to reproduce.
Rebecca Fillmore said researchers take the eggs from the female’s nest immediately and place them in an incubator until they hatch.
The turtles released into the Caney River are 3 to 6 years old, but it will be years before they reproduce. This particular species does not reach sexual maturity until 15 to 20 years after hatching, and some of its members can live for more than 100 years.
As predators go, they’re no slouch.
Ligon said the alligator snapping turtle is extremely omnivorous, meaning that it eats both plants and animals, and is important to the aquatic community.
On each of their tongues is something called a lingua lure, which basically means that part of the tongue works as a lure to catch food.
You name it, they’ll eat it, Ligon said.
And humans eat the alligator snapping turtle.
In the 1970s, their meat was sought to the point that it became a species of special concern in Oklahoma, Ligon said.
Those were the days when Campbell’s sold turtle soup and looked to inland turtles after it became illegal to harvest sea turtles.
Male alligator snapping turtles can grow to more than 200 pounds, which makes for a lot of turtle meat.
In the late 1990s, Oklahoma State University graduate students sampled the turtle population and found that the alligator snapping turtle had been totally depleted in most areas.
Ligon believes that the restocking could succeed, partly because of the Oklahoma Wildlife Conservation Commission’s three-year moratorium on the commercial harvesting of wild turtles in public waters, during which time the turtle population will be studied.
The moratorium came after environmental groups asked the state to stop the commercial harvest of wild turtles because of the threat of depleting their population and the potential consumption of contaminated turtle meat sold to Asian markets.
Turtles are endangered in China, where their meat is considered a delicacy.
Snapping turtles sent up river

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