Snapping Turtle (Chelydra serpentina)

Adult Size: 8" to 18½"

Description: The familiar "snapper" with massive head and powerful jaws. The carapace is tan to dark brown often masked with algea or mud, bearing 3 rows of weak to prominent keels, and serrated toward the back. The plastron is yellow to tan, unpatterned, relatively small, and cross shaped in outline. The tail is as long as the carapace, with saw toothed keels. There are tubercles on the neck. Wild specimens range to 45 lbs. Some fattened captives exceed 75lbs.

Habitat: Freshwater. Like soft mud bottoms with abundant vegetation. Also enters brackish waters.

Breeding: Mates in April to November with the peak laying season in June. Lays as many as 83 (typically 25 to 50) spherical, 1¼" eggs in 4" to 7" deep, flash shaped cavity. Each egg is directed into place by alternating movements of the hind feet. Incubation, depending on the weather, takes 9 to 18 weeks. In temperate localities,hatchlings overwinter in the nest. Females may retain sperm for several years. Females often travel to a nesting site some distance from the water.

Range: Southern Alberta to Nova Scotia, south to the Gulf of Mexico.

Diet: It eats invertebrates, carrion, aquatic plants, fish, birds, and small mammals.

Behavior: Highly aquatic, it like to rest in warm shallows, often buried in the mud, with only its eyes and nostrils exposed. It emerges in April from a winter retreat beneath an overhanging mudbank, under vegetative debris, or inside a muskrat lodge. It is an excellent swimmer, Individuals displaced 2 miles have returned to thbeir capture sites within several hours. Snappers strike viciously when liefted from the water or teased and can inflict a very serious bite.

Video

Conservation Status:

Additonal Notes: Some consider snapper meat a delicacy, and excellent soups are prepared from it.

Subspecies: Four with only two in our range.

Common Snapping Turtle(C.s. serpentina) - blunt tubercles on he neck. Found throughout our range, except Florida. Photo...

Florida Snapping Turtle(C.s. osceola) - pointed tubercles on the neck. Found throughout the Florida peninsula. Photo...