NC Diamondback Terrapin Conservation Network

Page under development: June 2008

Miscellaneous: Terrapin Conservation Efforts & Issues

The diamondback terrapin (Malaclemys terrapin) has been considered a status review species by the US Fish and Wildlife Service for over a decade. In part its conservation status has remained unchanged because the USFWS watches state designations and most states have little information concerning current population trends.

Issues are further complicated by the fact that many states cover terrapin regulations under fisheries units, while state wildlife agencies typically oversee conservation status listings. In North Carolina this is not the case. Several key issues face diamondback terrapins. These include a commercial harvest, unregulated and illegal traffic of animals for food markets, loss of nesting beaches through shoreline erosion and bulkheads constructed to prevent erosion, road mortality of nesting females, increased egg predation by growing populations of raccoons which are

supplemented by garbage associated with coastal development, and fatal collisions with boats and jet skis. One of the most serious problems is the drowning of terrapins accidentally captured in crab pots. New Jersey and Maryland require terrapin excluders on all recreational crab pots. In several states similar programs are now under consideration.

One on-going problem is terrapin catch in "ghost" crab pots. Abandoned pots in some cases continue to capture and drown terrapins for years. The North Carolina Audubon Society and the Tortoise Reserve have joined in a campaign to recover ghost pots in the state's estuaries. During the aerial surveys we have documented thousands of ghost pots in shallow waters. Many of these result from various hurricanes that have hit coastal areas over the last five years. There is about a 17% loss each year of the million or so crap pots that are fished in North Carolina's waters.

In 2008 The Tortoise Reserve and NC Audubon attained a grant from NOAA to study how to best go about a state wide crab pot clean up and NC Marine Fisheries has a program in place that annually removes thousands of abandoned pots from the state's waters. Watermen and other local citizens will be invited to join in the retrieval of unattended pots once the program is established. The pots will be fitted with by-catch excluders and given back to crabbers who volunteer to place excluders on an equal number of currently active pots. We also plan to present a public programs on the cultural and natural history of the terrapin during the cleanup period, and will attempt to make this an educational and festive event.

Diamondback terrapins are one of the most successful outreach and education species and enable a comprehensive conservation curriculum for citizens living in estuarine communities. The diamondback seems to bring out the nobility in us all.

"Passes and writes her will upon the tide,
And piles the ocean in a moving ring,
And every stagnant bay is brimmed with it,
Each mast-fringed port, each estuary wide."

Authur Christopher Benson (1862-1923) writing about water