http://www.slate.com/
Courtesy of Sean Sterrett.
They say you can get seven different kinds of meat from butchering a
turtle. Depending on what part of the turtle you’re chewing on, the
taste may be reminiscent of pork, or chicken, or veal, or fish, or
whatever … you get the picture. Perhaps this variability can partly
explain why turtle has been such a popular menu item throughout the
history of the United States. At least, it used to be. Not so long ago
you could find Campbell’s turtle soup sitting alongside minestrone and
tomato in grocery stores throughout the country. So what happened? How
and why did an American staple virtually vanish?
It’s a question Saveur magazine recently tried to tackle.
Now, if you ask me or anyone else who knows much about turtles and
turtle conservation, the answer is quite simple: There are not enough
turtles left to eat. For example, a picture of a few chefs hovering over
the carcass of a green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas) leads off the Saveur
article. Today green sea turtles, like all other species of sea
turtles, are federally protected under the Endangered Species Act. If
you ate one in the United States, you would be committing a felony.
Turtles are one of the most imperiled groups of animals on the
planet. Habitat loss is probably their biggest threat; when a wetland is
drained, a field paved over, or a nesting beach overrun with
condominiums, there is simply no space left for turtles. But harvesting
too many for food has played a key role in driving down turtle
populations in this country and across the world. In fact, the market
for turtle soup was so intensive in the United States that many of our
turtle populations are still recovering from trapping and harvesting
that occurred decades ago. Ironically, the Saveur article
exploring the loss of turtle soup did not even consider that the meal’s
popularity played an important role in its own vanishing act. As turtles
disappeared, so did turtle soup.
The Saveur article unwittingly demonstrates why so many
species have become threatened or gone extinct in the past few hundred
years. When we have a limited understanding of an animal’s natural
history and care only about its meat or feathers or shells, we may overlook how our actions could be killing them off for good.
Turtle populations have an interesting survival strategy. Most young
turtles and eggs are eaten by predators like raccoons, herons, and big
fish. This wasn’t historically a problem, because turtles that do
survive to adulthood typically live for many, many years. They produce
so many eggs over their lifetime that chances are good at least a few
will survive long enough to replace their aging parents. The strategy
works quite well as long as we don’t take the adult turtles out of the
population—particularly the females—before they’ve had their many years
of reproduction. That is why even individual turtles are so important (and why I have been known to go to great lengths to help them).
There are many different species of turtles, and we have different
relationships with (and recipes for) each of them. During the Great
Depression, gopher tortoises became such an important source of meat for
rural Southerners that they earned a new nickname, “Hoover chicken”
that honored, so to speak, our president at the time, Herbert Hoover.
That species is now federally threatened
in Louisiana, Mississippi, and western Alabama, and is under protection
everywhere it occurs. Diamondback terrapins, the beautifully patterned
turtles inhabiting brackish waters along the East Coast, were harvested so heavily for food that the U.S. government started to get concerned about their vastly depleted populations more than 100 years ago.
Any species could end up in soup or stew, but in this country turtle
soup is synonymous with the alligator snapping turtle. Interestingly,
you would never know of our long history with alligator snapping turtles
from reading the Saveur magazine piece, because it never even
mentioned the species. That’s like writing an entire article about
cheeseburgers and never mentioning beef … or cows.
Alligator snapping turtles are the largest freshwater turtle in North America. Formerly considered one species, there are now two or three different kinds of alligator snapping turtle, depending on whom you ask. They are quite impressive: Big old alligator snappers can reach well over 100 pounds. And old
is right, these turtles can live past 50 years, if not a century; they
don’t even become sexually mature and able to reproduce until after
their first decade of life. In the 1960s and 1970s we almost wiped out
alligator snapping turtles because so many adults were harvested for
soup. One former collector reported that he and his colleagues removed
several tons of these animals from one river in Georgia every day during the 1970s and only stopped when they weren’t catching enough anymore to make it worthwhile.
That river is the Flint River, which I lived next to from 2004 to
2007. Despite having lived near excellent alligator snapping turtle
habitat, I have seen only a few of these animals in my life. It is hard
to imagine the Flint River crawling with literally tons of giant
alligator snapping turtles. Maybe someday our streams and rivers will
again be chock-full of these beasts, but it won’t be during my lifetime.
Fortunately, alligator snapping turtles are now afforded some protection in every state in which they occur, and at this very moment
the federal government is under pressure to protect them under the
Endangered Species Act. Even Louisiana, once the hub of the turtle soup
industry, outlawed commercial collection of this species in 2004. Given
that these animals received protection only recently, it will be a long
time before populations rebound to their historic levels, if ever. In
some restaurants you can still find traditional turtle soup that
contains alligator snapping turtle, but these days the animals come from
farms and were not collected from wild populations.
Courtesy of Sean Sterrett.
The turtle hunters from the Saveur article were in Virginia, and their quarry was a different kind of snapping turtle, Chelydra serpentina.
This species is still relatively abundant in Virginia, but commercial
collection is illegal. Commercial collection of even relatively common
turtle species has recently been outlawed throughout much the
southeastern United States in response to an increasing demand from Asia.
This alarming and increasing demand had started to put an unsustainable
strain on our turtle populations. But in some states, depending on the
species, you can still take a couple for personal use.
Even if people are allowed to eat a few turtles every once in a
while, there is another important reason why we may not want to: It’s
not just bad for the turtles; it’s bad for us. Remember how turtles can
live for decades? Well, if that turtle is sitting in polluted water, it
is going to be absorbing and consuming contaminants for many years. This
unfortunate habit has made the snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina)—the same species that features heavily in the Saveur
article—a model organism for studying how pollutants persist in
wetlands. For example, despite a ban since 1979 on the manufacture of
polychlorinated biphenyls, turtles in some areas still have alarmingly
high concentrations of PCBs in their blood and their meat. PCBs can
cause a wide range of serious health problems in people. And forget
tuna—if you want to avoid mercury, you should cut snapping turtle out of
your diet. Patterns of pollutants differ depending on which swamp the
turtle has been sitting in for the past 50 years, but I think I’ll pass
either way.
Turtle soup in the United States did not fade away simply because our
palates changed. Our taste for turtle soup exploded to unsustainable
levels and caused the turtles to disappear first. They still haven’t
come back.
Dr. David A. Steen researches wildlife ecology and conservation biology, and blogs about his work at www.livingalongsidewildlife.com. Follow him on Twitter.
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