Hey y’all. Welcome to Fast Facts for Gen Z. I’m your host, Callie, and I don’t know anything about anything. Come with me on my exploration of the world, and I’ll tell you everything you ever, and never, wanted to know, through the eyes of Gen Z.
Today’s episode: Turtles. That’s it, really. I’m having a lot of thoughts this week, but none of them are particularly coherent except a recent fascination with turtles. So, here we are.
When I’m referring to turtles, I’ll mostly be talking about freshwater turtles. Not tortoises, the big ones who walk around on land and live for a very long time and are very slow. Not sea turtles either, though they are also lovely. My focus of the week has been on freshwater turtles.
When I’m out exploring the woods and stumble across a turtle, which happens fairly often, I almost always think, “ah, yeah, box turtle.” I’m pretty sure that I’m usually right, but honestly, all little turtles are box turtles to me. As it turns out, there are 15 types of turtles in North Carolina, not including snapping turtles or sea turtles, that I could very easily be looking at instead. And some of them get very large. Not as big as the big Galapagos tortoises you might think of, but like… surprisingly not small. You might have seen turtles lined up on logs in rivers and thought “Man… that’s big.” Some of them are also really, really small. Almost all turtles hatch out as these little, 1-2 inch hatchlings, but some of them don’t get all that much bigger than that. Some, not even over 4 inches at adult size. If it weren’t for the very turtle-y shape of all these turtles, it’d be hard to believe they’re the same kind of animal. Granted, just as with snakes and plants and, as I hear it, almost anything, taxonomy and what we define as the same or different kinds of animals is kinda loose and weird and changes a lot. If someone tries to reclassify the kingsnake genus one more time – I digress. There are lots of turtles.
One I want to talk about specifically is called a yellow-bellied slider, and a subspecies of that turtle, the red-eared slider. In the wild, you’ll almost always notice when a slider is around, but just after they’ve disappeared from view. They’re not super keen to bask peacefully amongst humans, so when they hear or see you coming, it’s into the water they go, making their presence noticeable but the turtles themselves hard to spot. We’ll get back to sliders in the wild, but I want to talk about red-eared sliders in captivity.
Red-eared sliders are one of the most, probably the most commonly kept turtle in captivity. If I do a quick search on Craigslist – a surprisingly common place to find reptiles, scams or otherwise – that’s one, two, three, four listings for sliders, out of twelve. And this one that just says “aquatic turtle,” no species identified, so this turtle is definitely wild-caught and almost definitely also a red-eared slider. The rest of these are ads for mealworms, a common turtle food. So! Very commonly kept and sold. There’s a lot of possible reasons for this, and I’m pretty sure the actual reason is all of them working together in just the right way. These days, I think the number one reason is availability. I’ve seen hatchlings go for two, maybe three dollars each. Or free! I’ve seen people give away red-eared slider hatchlings for free. They breed really quickly and have large clutches of eggs, so if a reptile breeder is getting into turtles, red-eared sliders are reliable and fast. But this begs the question: why are they so widely available? It’s kind of because they’re so commonly kept as pets. If there’s high demand for a particular type of turtle, then you want to sell that type of turtle, because it’s guaranteed business. So at this point, it’s basically a positive feedback loop of red-eared sliders, but I wanted to know how it started.
The answer is not what I expected. I don’t know what I expected, but I did not expect to learn that their popularity exploded when it was revealed that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are, in fact, Teenage Mutant Ninja Red-Eared Sliders. They were already around in the pet turtle community before then, but after that was revealed, everyone who knew anything about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles wanted to have one and name it after their favorite. Or, even worse, wanted to have four, one for each. I say “worse,” because even though you can get a cute little hatchling and put it in literally any sized aquarium, they do not stay little for very long. Like I said earlier, they breed very quickly, which is helped by the fact that they grow really fast and reach sexual maturity really fast and then males start fighting with other males and harassing females and it all goes downhill from there. A fully grown female red-eared slider can grow to almost a foot in length, which is large. That’s a large turtle. That’s a turtle that needs a 100-gallon aquarium or larger to survive. For context, the fish tanks you see displaying fish in pet stores are probably fifteen gallons, and my snake’s terrarium, which takes up an entire desk, is only forty gallons. To imagine his tank doubling in size and then some… no. That’s a really big aquarium. For ONE turtle. Because you can’t keep them together, they’ll be mean to each other because turtles are mean and territorial and don’t like each other. The cheapest 100-gallon tank I found online was $500 for the tank alone, never mind the filters and lights and turtle-specific supplies.
So, when little Michelangelo or Raphael or Leonardo or Donatello or… I don’t know, Shelly, becomes too big for its hatchling aquarium, and suddenly everyone in the family realizes that a turtle is a more difficult and expensive pet than they anticipated, what do they do? It’s a turtle, right? That’s a wild animal! You can just release it, right? It’ll do fine in the wild, right? Well, in the case of red-eared sliders, they do absolutely fine. Very well actually. Very, very, invasively well. Red-eared sliders are super hardy and super adaptable, and if a bunch of them get released into an ecosystem, which is what happens when a super common pet is also a super bad pet, they outcompete other turtle species, hybridize with other turtle species and create either very weird turtles or very infertile turtles – infertile turtle, that rhymes – they just absolutely destroy the ecosystem. These turtles are native to the central-southern USA. So, like Texas and New Mexico and Oklahoma, but also Kansas and Missouri and Illinois and Tennessee. But that’s about it. In the rest of the US, and all across the world where they’re kept as pets, they’re an invasive species. They’re on the list of 100 most damaging invasive species.
But what exactly makes them so damaging? What do turtles do for the environment anyway? Well, each species serves a different purpose in its ecosystem, which is why an invasive species coming in and outcompeting them for resources can be so damaging. Take the diamondback terrapin for instance. It’s a little species of turtle that eats mostly mollusks, particularly a kind of snail called the periwinkle snail. Periwinkle snails are the really little cone-shaped guys you see on river rocks. They’re cute, and they eat algae and stuff, but if they didn’t have predators like the diamondback terrapin, they’d turn a lush marsh to a barren wasteland of mud in a matter of months. If a red-eared slider population showed up and started competing for basking sites or shelters or they bring in diseases from a captive environment, it could be disastrous to the balance of that ecosystem. And it has been. Because of the damage they’ve done, red-eared sliders have been banned in multiple foreign countries, as well as several US states and cities. Japan is one, off the top of my head, that has banned them. I’m pretty sure the EU has banned the import of red-eared sliders, or at least it’s under strict regulation, and if you already have one, you can’t breed it or sell it or rehome it, and you definitely can’t release it. It’s yours. As far as states go… Oregon is one… Pennsylvania maybe? Not positive. You get the idea, though. It’s usually pretty hard to get governments to care about either endangered species or invasive species, so to have worldwide efforts against this turtle says a lot.
To be honest with you, no turtles are really suitable to be pets in the way we most often imagine them. Handling stresses them out and they’re mean to each other and also to you and they’re expensive and dirty and hard to feed. Like, snakes make better pets because some of them would love to be friends with you. My snake is friends with me mostly because I give him food, but also because he knows I’m not a threat. He’s socialized. Most turtles will never be socialized and they will always be mad at you. The only way you can keep a turtle as a pet is if you treat them like an angry fish. Like an angelfish. You take care of its needs and then you leave it the heck alone and look at it because they’re fun to look at. I think that’s a perfectly good way to keep a turtle. Personally, I like them a lot, but I’m cool having a pet that I don’t bother that often. Reptiles are neat like that. It’s honestly a shame that the cheapest, most widely available turtles are so unsuitable for life as a pet. If you look up “beginner turtles,” you’ll definitely find red-eared sliders near the top of the list, not because they’re easy, but just because they’re the most common. Not a good reason! Not a good beginner turtle! I’m not gonna tell you what a good beginner turtle is because I am not a professional and you should do LOTS of your own research if you’re going to be looking into any pet, let alone a turtle. Please.
Thank you for listening to Fast Facts for Gen Z. It’s been a fun one! I have to go feed my snake before he gets mad at me for talking about turtles instead of talking about him. He definitely doesn’t know what’s happening, but it’s fun to think about anyway. This is Callie, signing off.
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