Environmental groups want to ban commercial hunting of snapping and softshell turtles in Missouri – via Herp Digest

By Kristen Taketa St. Louis Post-Dispatch  Aug 24, 2016 

Two environmental groups want Missouri to ban commercial hunting of snapping and softshell turtles, which they say is crippling the reptiles' habitats and taking a toll on the turtle population.

Commercial hunting of the two kinds of turtles exacerbates water pollution, habitat destruction, road mortality and incidental take from fishery devices, according to a letter penned to the Missouri Department of Conservation by the Center for Biological Diversity, a national organization based in Tucson, and St. Louis-based Great Rivers Environmental Law Center.

A 2014 research report about the common snapping and softshell turtles, the only kinds of turtles that Missouri considers to be game, found that "even low annual harvest rates may have detrimental effects on the long-term sustainability of turtle populations at localized scales."

“Unregulated turtle traders are mining Missouri rivers in a frenzy that’s reminiscent of the gold rush,” said Collette Adkins, a biologist and senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Commercial trapping is devastating to turtle populations that are already suffering from a lot of other threats, like habitat loss, water pollution and getting hit by cars.”

A Missouri Department of Conservation document called the turtles "economically important" and said they are "highly valued as a human food source." The turtles are harvested and exported abroad for food, medicinal purposes and to serve as pets.

Turtles are good for the environment because they help keep balance in an ecosystem's food web structure by feeding on water plants, dead animals, snails, aquatic insects and crayfish, the letter said.

Sea Mammals Find U.S. Safe Harbor

Apr. 11, 2013 — In 1972, a U.S. Senate committee reported, "Many of the great whales which once populated the oceans have now dwindled to the edge of extinction," due to commercial hunting. The committee also worried about how tuna fishing was accidentally killing thousands of dolphins, trapped in fishing gear. And they considered reports about seal hunting and the decline of other mammals, including sea otters and walruses.

In October of that year, Congress passed the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Four decades later, new research shows that the law is working.

Not only has the act "successfully prevented the extirpation of any marine mammal population in the United States in the forty years since it was enacted," write University of Vermont conservation biologist Joe Roman and his colleagues in a new report, but also, "the current status of many marine mammal populations is considerably better than in 1972."

Their study, published online on March 22, in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, shows that population trends for most stocks of these animals remain unknown, but of those stocks that are known, many are increasing.

"At a very fundamental level, the MMPA has accomplished what its framers set out to do," says co-author Andrew Read, professor of marine biology at Duke University, "to protect individual marine mammals from harm as a result of human activities."

Some marine mammals, like endangered right whales, continue to be in deep trouble, but other populations "particularly seals and sea lions, have recovered to or near their carrying capacity," the scientists write.

Continued:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130411194644.htm