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Terrapins in China's Food Markets
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In 2001 the Governor requested that the Maryland Diamondback Terrapin Task Force be formed to review the status of terrapins and provide recommendations to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources on how best to manage the health of the terrapin populations. This task force was well represented with biologists, commercial fishermen, state officials students and citizens.
2001 Governor's Maryland Diamondback Terrapin Task Force Recommendations
This document was released in September of 2001. In April 2006, House Bill 980 Natural Resources: Terrapin was passed requiring the DNR Fisheries Service to propose regulations in keeping with the Task Force's recommendations.
The proposed regulations shorten the season, but several recommendations were ignored, including the first and most important, that a suspension of the fishery is needed until a stock assessment is available.
This suspension, or moratorium, was not included in the regulations despite the documented and increasing levels of unreported harvesting. This is of particular concern because terrapins live in local populations or defined home ranges from which they rarely leave. This makes them more vulnerable to overharvesting.
The unlimited harvest is to take place August 1 to November 1 despite the lack of population assessments, except for one in the Patuxent River: the study population declined 75% over the course of the now 20-year long study.
Terrapins in the Chesapeake Bay are winsome looking turtles. To give you an idea of some of the myriad colors these animals come in, below are some snapshots of terrapin that were part of a survey in the waters of Martin National Wildlife Refuge near Smith Island, MD in 2003.
Terrapin are commercially fished in this area.
A female with a 6 inch plastron, or bottom part of the shell, is within the proposed slot limit, or size range that can be commercially harvested.
This younger female is smaller, roughly the same size as the full grown males who have 4 inch plastrons (also within the slot limit) in the pictures below.
At this size terrapin are also small enough to be vulnerable to getting caught in crab pots, including abandoned or wayward "ghost" crab pots that can catch and drown unknown numbers of terrapins for years until they rust through.
Some states like New Jersey have proactively added requirements that commercial and recreational crab pots have biodegradeable panels to prevent such future drowning deaths.
Camera shy
This is an old, very large female.
Her head is so big due to the use and development of her powerful jaw muscles that she uses to crush food items like periwinkle snails that feed on saltmarsh grasses.
Recently it's been found that spikes in periwinkle populations can denude saltmarsh shores of their grasses. These grasses are extremely important as their root systems are what hold shorelines in place and help keep them from eroding away.
Terrapins perform an important role in keeping periwinkle populations in check and so, our shorelines stable.
Tagged turtles, all caught in one net, about to be brought back to their home waters. (The largest turtle is the 6 inch female shown in the first picture.)
These terrapin were entraped for this survey using a modified commercial fyke fishing net; in other words, these were lucky. Unlike commercial fyke nets, floats were added to make them buoyant and keep an air pocket available so turtles could breathe and not drown. They were then tagged and released where they were caught. Terrapin are also commercially fished in these waters.
The number of Chesapeake terrapins dying each year as accidental or drowned bycatch in fishing gear such as these nets, crab and eel pots and "ghost" crab pots is unknown but certainly approaches the thousands.
One case this spring documented the drownings of hundreds of terrapin in eight fyke nets near Eastern Neck National Wildlife Refuge near Rock Hall. Coincidentally, this was also a site of a terrapin population survey.
Our terrapin populations cannot withstand the additional stress of commercial exploitation. Please help us protect our mascot and sign The Terrapin Petition!
From Ernest Hemingway's, The Old Man and the Sea:
“Most people are heartless about turtles because a turtle's heart will beat for hours after he has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too.”
