EAST HAMPTON STAR (New York) 15 June 03 Nature Notes (Larry Penny)
On the way home from work Friday evening, the writer stopped to watch a large snapping turtle cross Swamp Road in Northwest. It was headed toward Larkin Pond in the headwaters of Northwest Creek.
Its movements were laborious and, notwithstanding my presence, it paused to rest en route. It took 10 minutes and a little prodding before the turtle finally entered the edge of the woods on the other side of the pavement.
Sunday morning, Emily Cobb called. A very large snapping turtle was laying eggs in her yard, which is on the south edge of Accabonac Harbor. Her cats were showing interest; her dog cared not a bit.
Just like everything else this spring, snapping turtle egg-laying is quite late. It usually starts in the last week of May and is over before the end of the first week in June. Only the females leave the water during the breeding season; the males are left behind.
This kind of annual sortie upon land for reproductive purposes has been going on for thousands of years, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, as the snapping turtle is no newcomer on the tree of evolution.
The snapping turtle is our largest nonmarine turtle. Some very old individuals weigh 50 pounds or more, but the average adult weight is about 20 pounds. In Mattituck on the North Fork, snapping turtles were called torrups and were feared, but almost never seen by young boys and girls.
The writer and his boyhood pal
Bobby Magor put together a little enclosure where they kept snapping turtles they had captured from Lake Maratooka behind the Mattituck school.
We fed them and watched them. We provided them with a tub of water, but they really didn't care for their makeshift accommodations and we eventually put them back in the lake.
While we had them, we would get them to snap by putting a stick close to their heads. We learned very quickly the speed of their head thrusts and the length of their necks. The head shot forward a good eight inches so that the jaws could clamp on the stick end. We quickly learned why they were called snapping turtles and why we had been fearful of them. We dared not tempt the turtles with our fingers.
The snapping turtle ranges from the Gulf of Mexico north into Canada, from the Atlantic Ocean all the way to the Rocky Mountains. It is North America's most ubiquitous aquatic turtle. Its larger cousin, the alligator snapping turtle, doesn't get much farther north than mid-Georgia, except in the Midwest, where it gets all the way to southern Indiana and Illinois by virtue of the Mississippi.
While snappers in captivity have reached weights of 85 pounds, alligator snappers regularly weigh more than 100 pounds. The record weight is 219 pounds. Wiggling your toes under water in front of one of these behemoths would be a very foolish act indeed.
Larkin's Pond is fresh, Accabonac Harbor is tidal and saline. You might wonder how snapping turtles, which are listed in all of the field guides as freshwater turtles, are able to tolerate marine waters as well.
Apparently, they are able to osmoregulate effectively, the way killifishes and other euryhaline species do. Our other local freshwater turtles, the painted, musk, and spotted, are not so gifted, although the spotted often occupies ditches that receive tidal water during moon tide events. It's doubtful whether there are any ponds around, fresh, brackish, or tidal, bigger than your dining room table that don't have a snapper or two.
Snapping turtles prefer meat to vegetation, and are particularly fond of fish. Their snapping jaws and long necks allow them to remain quiet on a pond bottom half-hidden. When a fish gets too close to the head, it snaps forward, the way a heron's does. Pity the fish that is unwary.
The alligator snapper has a lure on the end of its protrusible tongue. It is able to attract its prey to the maw of its gaping jaws before grabbing it.
Snapping turtles are not standoffish when it comes to cygnets, goslings, and ducklings, especially within a few days after hatching. When you notice their numbers dwindling as time goes by, the culprit that is responsible for the progressive mortality is most likely the snapping turtle.
On the other hand, snapping turtle eggs are a favorite of many predators, chief among them raccoons and foxes. Very few clutches make it through to hatching. Snapping turtle moms don't hang around to guard their nests the way crocodilian moms do. That's why snapping turtles lay comparatively large numbers of eggs, often 20 or more. Box turtles only lay a handful, usually only five or so.
Hatchling snappers from late May eggs emerge at the end of summer. The snapping turtle observed Friday was more than 150 feet from the pond to which it was headed. Snapping turtle eggs can be laid a couple of hundred yards or more away from the parent pond. If they were always laid at the edge of the pond, they would be much easier to find.
The little hatchlings have a formidable task getting to the pond once out of the ground. How they know which direction to head in, once out of the nest, is still a great mystery. It's not always downhill, which is the case for most sea turtlets hatching from eggs laid in the upper shore. Their sense of smell, which is quite refined, must play a big part in this homing.
Once they get back to watery nurseries, it takes more than five years before the females are large enough to mate and go ashore to lay their own eggs.
Nature Notes