NEWS-JOURNAL (Daytona Beach, Florida) 27 August 06 Red-eared slider one slippery pet (Virginia Smith)
Daytona Beach: Few things could be sweeter than a baby turtle, emerald green and small as a silver dollar, sizing you up from the palm of your hand.
It's somewhere between a toy and an animal, a life so new and so miniature, it's not quite real.
What kid could resist?
On a recent weekday, Katerra McDonnell, 8, had a tough choice to make at the Daytona Flea Market. Which baby turtle was the cutest?
Vendor Frank Temple helped her choose from among at least 100. "You like that guy? You see another one you like?" Finally, McDonnell had two, swimming in a clear plastic box.
Lately, there are lots of these baby turtles around. They're in souvenir stores, some pet stores, on the Boardwalk and the Ocean Walk in Daytona Beach. At the flea market at least five vendors sell them.
The curious thing is that the turtles are illegal. Selling them is punishable, technically anyway, by up to a year in jail.
Baby turtles were popular dime-store pets in the 1950s and '60s. But they were banned by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1975 after some 280,000 cases of salmonella sickness -- largely in children -- were linked to them.
Most of the millions of turtles sold back then died, and baby green turtles disappeared, sharing the nostalgia shelf with Johnny Eagle cap guns and Colorola boxes.
Yet here, at the Daytona Flea Market, they're back, for $3.99.
And more are on their way. Millions more.
From Boom To Banned
In the 1940s, a group of men on the Louisiana-Mississippi border began collecting wild turtle eggs from riverbanks.
The eggs were from red-eared sliders, Trachemys scripta elegans, a species native to the Deep South and Texas, bearing a bright crimson stripe on their heads.
The collectors hatched out the eggs, and since the babies didn't need to eat for a while after hatching, they could be shipped far and wide.
As demand for the turtles grew, the turtle collectors became turtle farmers, breeding the hardy sliders in giant stagnant ponds and feeding them chicken entrails.
Babies were sent en masse to pet shops and to Woolworth's, the now-defunct dime-store chain. They were sold with small "lagoons," plastic water trays with plastic palms in the middle.
The turtle farms prospered and multiplied, and for miles around, an adult red-eared slider could not be found -- they'd all been dumped into the farmers' ponds.
By the 1960s the Louisiana turtle farmers had formed a trade association and were moving 12 million baby red-eared sliders a year within the United States. They also shipped to Japan and Europe, where little pet turtles proved equally irresistible.
There was a slight problem, however -- the turtles were loaded with salmonella, a bacteria found in poultry and reptiles that causes severe stomach sickness, and in children, even more dangerous symptoms.
Salmonella exposure is easily prevented by a hand-washing regimen (or a dollop of Purell), but small kids aren't so fastidious. To make matters worse, small turtles are bite-size -- and kids popped them into their mouths.
In May 1975, the federal Food and Drug Administration announced a ban on baby turtles. No turtle under 4 inches in length could be sold in the United States, except for "scientific, educational, or exhibition purposes." Stiff penalties were attached.
The era of the baby turtle was over. Or so it would seem.
Taking Turtles Global
The turtle farmers took a hit in 1975. They fought mightily to reverse the ban, but more than half the farms went out of business. The rest turned to Europe and Asia, and became exporters.
New countries got a taste for baby pet turtles, and by the early 1990s, millions of red-eared sliders left the United States every year.
The industry was back on its feet, and for a long time, turtle prices were stable. In 1995, the Justice Department discovered why, and slapped the Louisiana farmers with an antitrust action for price-fixing.
In the late 1990s, several European countries banned the import of sliders. It wasn't about salmonella -- the farmers had taken great steps to clean up their act-- but the fact that the turtles were everywhere.
Sliders, as they grow, lose their adorable wide-eyed look and get aggressive. They turn a drab greenish black and don't hesitate to bite their owners. Small wonder they've found themselves living wild in ponds and streams the world over.
Now they're breeding on their own and are crowding native turtle species from Taiwan to the Everglades. It hasn't helped that some Asian cultures have religious traditions in which young turtles are released, often by the hundreds.
Red-eared sliders, tough as nails once they're adults, can survive even in frigid climates. The IUCN-World Conservation Union now lists them among the world's 100 worst invasive species.
They've displaced European pond turtles, California's Western painted turtles, and native painted turtles in New York's Central Park, said Allen Salzberg, a journalist and turtle expert in New York.
"I've seen them in fountains in France -- they're all over the place," Salzberg said. "In Southeast Asia and India there are sacred turtle temples -- half the turtles are red-eared sliders."
In China, where turtles are eaten as well as kept as pets, folks couldn't get enough red-eared sliders. In the late '90s, turtle prices fluctuated wildly after the price-fixing scandal, anywhere from 30 cents to $1.20 per animal. China, despite the high prices, continued to buy in massive quantities -- at least 8 million a year in the '90s, and 10 million more recently.
"The Chinese market was the largest overseas market there was," said Roy Farmer, who works for the Concordia turtle farm in Louisiana. The farms multiplied to meet the demand.
"Before three years ago, there were 17 or 20 (local farms). Then all of a sudden there were more than 40." And Louisiana was breeding 12 million hatchlings again -- just like in the industry's heyday.
Then, starting in about 2004, Chinese buyers stopped placing orders. They'd been importing massive numbers for nearly a decade -- and red-eared sliders can breed at seven years.
"They screwed us to the wall," said Farmer, who speculates that the Chinese government supported a clandestine breeding program. "But you have no one to blame but yourself. The price got too high."
And this, Farmer said, presented a very serious problem: "12 million hatchlings sitting on people's shelves in Louisiana."
Turtle farmers, he said, "are in a dead panic. People have their livelihoods hanging on these things. I can promise you, this year you will see more illegal sales than you've seen since the '70s."
Surplus Turtles = Black Market
Farmer's business refuses to sell baby turtles within the United States.
Other turtle farms seem less concerned, and some openly advertise online, using words like "adopt" in place of "buy." One Web site urges customers to "adopt a turtle for $3.95!"
Frank Temple, like most local turtle vendors, buys his supply directly from three Louisiana farms. They arrive in UPS boxes containing 200 hatchlings each, he said. He got into the business only a few months ago, he said.
At his turtle table at the Daytona Flea Market is a handwritten sign: "For Education Purposes Only." That sign, Temple hopes, is enough legal cover to sell baby turtles without penalty.
The Food and Drug Administration does not share this view; in a recent warning letter it told a vendor at a Fort Lauderdale flea market that despite his similar sign, "it is clear that your firm has been selling . . . undersized turtles as pets . . . your firm's activities do not meet the scientific, educational, or exhibition purposes exemption."
Put simply, "it's not legal," said Shari H. Shambaugh, an FDA compliance officer in Maitland.
But the FDA has sent out very few warning letters, despite the growing number of businesses selling turtles. And the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, which has far more officers in Florida than the FDA, chooses not to enforce the 4-inch rule.
"Basically it's just what the staff decided," said Kevin Enge, a herpetologist with the commission. The 4-inch law is a nuisance to serious collectors and breeders of other turtle species, a sizable industry in Florida. "It's gonna really hurt a lot of people" to enforce, Enge said.
"It's an idiotic, meaningless law," said Marc Cantos, a specialty turtle breeder in Fort Myers, who noted that any reptile can carry salmonella, and a kid can lick a 12-inch turtle as easily as a small one. The 4-inch law "was written in response to an epidemic in the '70s caused by feeding turtles chicken entrails," Cantos said, and is obsolete.
Still, the state might begin to enforce it, Enge said, due to the environmental consequences of so many sliders being sold.
Red-eared sliders are not native to Florida, but they might as well be by now. Enge once set a few traps in Miami, to see if they'd found their way there. "I caught 28 red-eared sliders, and nothing else," he said.
Dale Jackson, a scientist with the Florida Natural Areas Inventory in Tallahassee, formally petitioned the state for a slider ban last August.
"A ban is the only way to go," Jackson said, if Florida is to prevent further flooding with red-ears.
So far the best he's managed is to get the turtles booted from one local mall. Another mall ignores his pleas. People like little turtles.
Starting in the late 1960s, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta spent years establishing a link between baby turtle sales and salmonella sickness.
By 1975, when turtles were finally banned by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the data was damning.
Salmonella is a bacterium that occurs naturally in birds and reptiles. Ingesting it can cause severe stomach sickness in adults, and even more dangerous effects in children.
"Turtles continue to be a significant carrier of pathogenic organisms, particularly affecting small children," the FDA declared in a May 1975 news release. "A ban of sales is the only action which will adequately protect public health."
But the turtle farmers were undaunted. Their representatives first tried to discredit the salmonella links, and later, tried to eradicate the bacteria in turtles.
They quit feeding them raw poultry, a major source of their contamination, and hired a Louisiana State University biologist to produce a salmonella-free turtle, all in hopes of reversing the FDA ban.
The biologist experimented with dipping eggs in antibiotics, then chemicals, and even sending each baby turtle packaged in a little plastic dome, for purity.
It seemed to work -- the turtles, which were still legal to ship overseas, were tested and certified "salmonella-free." But salmonella has a way of reappearing when animals are under stress, and a number of the certified turtles tested positive later, even if they weren't nearly as loaded as they'd once been.
"A head of lettuce can legally contain a certain amount of harmful bacteria," said Roy Farmer, who works for the Concordia Turtle Farm in Louisiana. "The turtles leaving the country don't have 1 percent of that."
"We can greatly, greatly reduce the amount of salmonella in a baby turtle," said Keith Boudreaux, a third-generation turtle farmer in Ponchatoula, La.
With "common-sense hygiene," Boudreaux said, "the baby turtle is a safe pet."
It's also one that if properly regulated, could be a billion-dollar-a year boon to the pet industry, which makes most of its money on supplies, not live animals.
Michael Maddox of the Pet Industry Joint Advisory Council, a Washington firm that's lobbied for turtle farmers since the 1970s, said he isn't convinced a salmonella-free turtle exists. "I think there's no question that (salmonella) occurs to some degree," he said.
But Europe and Asia, which have imported millions for decades, have not reported turtle-related salmonella outbreaks. "Millions of (baby sliders) are sold every year," said Marc Cantos, a turtle breeder in Fort Myers. "And millions of people are not getting sick."
Stateside, the turtle farmers and the pet industry never gave up their campaign to lift the rule barring sale of turtles smaller than 4 inches. Louisiana regulates its turtle industry tightly, and its congressmen have gotten on board in recent years, pressuring the FDA to lift its ban.
If the FDA ever does lift the ban, though, there's nothing preventing tens of millions of sliders from being imported back into the United States from China, where they're now breeding American red-eared sliders.
"Louisiana produces about 12 million a year. Hainan is producing 20 million this year," said Farmer. "And the current overseas price is 20 cents," a fifth of the Louisiana price.
So if the FDA ban were lifted, and no import laws followed, "within six months the market would be flooded with 20-cent Chinese turtles!" Farmer said. It would be a nightmare for the American turtle farmers, but a boon, perhaps, for Purell.
Red-eared slider one slippery pet