Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Maybe it's an easy one for you turtle nuts but I can't ID it. I'm guessing some kind of Cooter, Texas, Rio Grande, etc. but it sure doesn't look like one to me. Anyway, it was found near the Just North of the Rio Grande River in Dimmit County Texas crossing the road today. Anyone?

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Snakes of Hudspeth County, Texas

maybe he just came out of the mud and his colors haven't come in yet..

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Snakes of Hudspeth County, Texas

These guys turn up on this forum frequently. It appears to be a male redear. As Dimmit county is well south of the recorded range (insofar as I'm aware) of the similar-looking Rio Grande Slider (Trachemys gigae), it "should" be a redear.

Redears from the southern Rio Grande are often distinctly different (brighter) in appearance from "normal" redears, but they don't appear to be affiliated with the Rio Grande Slider (now considered a separate species and found in the north Rio Grande system to around the Big Bend region), although your pictured specimen seems to show curiously short claws on the front feet. While redear males possess long claws on the front feet, Rio Grande Slider males have normal-length claws on the front feet.

Male redears have a tendency to progressively darken out with age, which the one you pictured has done. Melanism of this sort is not reported in the Rio Grande Slider, and similarly, I have been told by an individual who works with hundreds of the southern Rio Grande-type redears that the males here similarly do not darken out. Perhaps this is an example of an exception? Pictured below is a melanistic male redear from hundreds of miles east, from the south Mississippi River drainage.

Interesting. Red-ear would have never crossed my mind. I used to keep red-ears when I was a kid (as did most shade-tree herpetologists) but never one that looked anywhere near this one. The Red-ear's range does cover Dimmit though so it sounds plausable.
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Snakes of Hudspeth County, Texas