Snapping Turtles Now Protected

Gray Merriam | May 10, 2017

After many years of informed concern by conservationists, the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources has finally made it illegal to hunt snapping turtles.

Snapping turtles have been listed as species of Special Concern both Federally and by Ontario but that gave them no protection and OMNR continued to state a limit of two turtles in their list of game animals.

Mortality is critical to snapping turtles because their earliest  reproduction is delayed for up to 20 years. Even then only 7 out of 10,000 eggs survive to adulthood. These characteristics of their reproductive life history combine to mean that, on average, female snappers must live until they are at least 25 if the population is not to decrease.

Egg-laying females search for sandy, south-facing slopes to dig nests for their eggs. Our roads often cut through turtle habitat and females dig nests in the gravelly road shoulders. Many more snappers, both females and hatched young, are killed on roads than were ever killed by hunting.

Conservationists have a victory in their fight against snappers being on the game list but the bleak future of snapping turtle populations is in the hands of drivers.