Bill said:Quoted message said:On Sun, 03 Jun 2007 01:13:09 -0600, [email hidden] wrote:
[snip]
Quoted message said:Finally, here's about ten pounds of expectant mother, a bit bigger
than a bike helmet. Inflamed by a thunderstorm, she foolishly dug a
nest this afternoon at the edge of a sandy but poorly drained two-rut
road, fifteen feet from her marsh:
http://i12.tinypic.com/6gxpi1g.jpg
Tails are often broken or truncated, but this tail is pristine, ready
for the show ring. (Yes, I once kept them as pets, but no, there are
no formal best-of-show competitions.)
http://i13.tinypic.com/4zvf9nb.jpg
Excellent shell, little moss, no leeches, no holes:
http://i17.tinypic.com/6434ia9.jpg
The tail has been moved to one side to show to advantage, while the
eye catches the camera flash:
http://i8.tinypic.com/5y9huds.jpg
Cheers,
Carl Fogel
Snapping turtles don't bask much, but they often float far out on a
nearby pond, so this evening I was looking for the tell-tale shell and
head just barely above the water.
Alas, I saw nothing but ducks and geese.
However, part of a cottonwood log covered with dry gray bark was
sticking up out of the water in a nearby narrow channel.
After watching the log for a while, I climbed a convenient tree and
took some pictures of the log, which was close to three feet long from
the tip of its nose to the end of its tail:
http://i9.tinypic.com/5xzxetu.jpg
You can see that my Tarzan act has disturbed the log, which has raised
its head and is ready to deal with any irritating ducklings that come
too close. The two bottles give some idea of the size of the log, most
of which is below the waterline. Judging by the logs that I kept as
pets, this one is easily over twenty pounds.
Cheers,
Carl Fogel
Looking at the apparent size of the 'log' I can tell I would not want to
mess with it. I picked some up on interstate 40 in Oklahoma to put them
out of harm's way and they did their level best to bite me. I tried the
pencil test since I had one in the car and the test turtle bit it clean
in half. Feisty little buggers.
Bill Baka
Dear Bill,
Usually, the claim is a broomstick.
In practical tests, even large common snappers were barely able to
break a pencil. This is unsurprising, since they don't eat sticks or
gnaw bones.
The tell-tale sign of the myth is that the stick/pencil/broom-handle
is always bitten in _half_, which is impossible.
A turtle's beak would have to divide any stick into _three_ pieces,
leaving the middle section hopelessly wedged in the lower beak. No one
ever mentions having to remove the chunk of wood stuck in the turtle's
mouth.
A large common snapper's head is about the size of a big fist--and all
the jaw muscles are right there on the side of the skull, not lurking
up the elbow.
Common snappers are chiefly bottom-dwelling carrion feeders, but will
grab live crayfish, frogs, ducklings, small snakes, and unwary fish.
If you keep common snappers as pets, you learn that they seize freshly
killed bullfrogs with their beaks and then tear them to pieces with
their powerful clawed forelegs. My largest pet was a plump 28-pound
female. She couldn't bite through a bullfrog leg, but she could rip
the amphibians in half with her claws and gulp them down.
A foolish claim is floating around the internet about snapping turtles
having thousand-pound bites. Possibly someone was thinking of a 150-lb
alligator snapper, an entirely different beast than a common snapper,
which is huge in the wild at 40 pounds.
(The record weight for a wild common snapper was a 68-lb Nebraskan,
much to the embarrassment of certain Southern states. The commonly
cited 86-lb common snapper was a huge, overfed captive, which was kept
in a swill barrel and bore about as much resemblance to a normal
snapper as Chalo does to a typical RBT poster.)
Here's a fair example of a wild snapper record:
http://www.kdwp.state.ks.us/news/layout/set/print/kdwp_info/news/web_news/2006_web_news/december_2006/arkansas_river_yields_new_state_record_snapping_turtle
And another state wild record:
http://www.bio.davidson.edu/people/midorcas/research/StResearch/bigturtle/bigturtle.htm
(It's not uncommon to catch two snappers in the same trap like the
North Carolina giant and his little friend. You bait a simple box trap
with liver scraps, and the snappers follow the scent through the
water. I once had a hell of a time getting a pair of 18-pound males
out of a large box-trap that I'd foolishly built when I expected only
a single 10-lb snapper if I was lucky.)
Here's a pdf with some details about record weights:
http://wfs.sdstate.edu/wfsdept/Publications/Theses/Hammer,%20Donald%20A.%20M.S.-1968.pdf
"What perhaps makes chelydrids most interesting is what they eat, or
at least what they bite. ‘Large individuals are known to have caused
injury to people unwary enough to step into or swim in the water near
them, and they are quite capable of removing a toe or finger if given
the opportunity’ (Alderton 1988, p. 112). Indeed, they are anecdotally
credited with being able to ‘bite through a broom handle’. For his
excellent TV series ‘O’Shea’s Dangerous Reptiles’, Mark O’Shea decided
to test this dubious assertion. With the help of a colleague he caught
the largest and nastiest alligator snappers he could, [censored] them off
by poking them, and then [censored] them off some more by shoving a broom
handle into their mouths. All the turtles bit happily, and bit hard.
And as impressive as it was, sad to say not one turtle was powerful
enough to cleave neatly through 25 thick mm of solid wood, which to be
honest isn’t much of a surprise."
"Rather more rigorous tests were applied by Herrel et al. (2002) who
tested the bite force of numerous diverse turtles, including both
snappers and alligator snappers. They found snappers to have bite
forces of between 208 and 226 Newtons, and alligator snappers of
between 158 and 176 N."
http://darrennaish.blogspot.com/2006/05/snapping-turtles-part-iii-bite-lunge.html
Here's the scholarly Herrel et al. article mentioned above, with
enough graphs to please Robert Chung and an early table of bite forces
for a variety of turtles, with a common snapper (chelydra serpentina)
6th on the awkwardly rotated alphabetical list:
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/pdf/10.1046/j.1420-9101.2002.00459.x
The roughly 10-lb common snapper managed a bite force of 209 Newtons,
or about 47 pounds, only 5% of the wild thousand-pound claims. Most
RBT posters can break a hundred pounds.
You do not, however, want to let even a baby snapper with a 2-inch
shell get its jaws on your finger, whose flesh is considerably easier
to damage than a pencil and much more sensitive. (Guess how I know.)
Cheers,
Carl Fogel
