SHELL SHOCKED!
The sad story behind Prospect Park’s beloved turtles
COURIER LIFE, OCTOBER 15-21, 2021 45
BY BEN BRACHFELD
Regular visitors to Prospect
Park are well familiar with
the population of turtles that
roam the lake of Brooklyn’s
Backyard — but few are familiar
with the somber story of
how the shell creatures came
to be so populous in the park.
The bulk of the park’s turtle
population consists of redeared
sliders — a little critter
about the size of a dinner
plate, and so-named for the
shock of red along the side of
their heads amidst an otherwise
greenish body.
Scores of them live in Prospect
Park, and they typically
spend their days sunning on
partially submerged rocks,
swimming in the lake, and,
for the most part, going about
their business underneath the
murky water.
But the dispriting truth is
that those turtles are either
abandoned pets, or the descendants
of abandoned pets.
Red-eared sliders are not
native to the New York metropolitan
area, nor to the northeastern
United States. Rather,
their natural habitat is mainly
in the south, especially the
Mississippi River Delta. By
Mother Nature’s edict, those
critters should not be in Prospect
Park.
But red-eared sliders are
the most common turtles kept
as pets in the United States,
and the most commonly traded
pet turtles in the world. They
are often adopted as hatchlings,
which is technically illegal,
as New York law prohibits
the sale of turtles under 4
inches, a move adopted in the
1950s to prevent salmonella
outbreaks caused by children
putting turtles in their mouth
or kissing them, says Lorri
Cramer of the New York Turtle
and Tortoise Society.
Nonetheless, they can often
be found being sold at fairs or
in unregulated pet shops.
Unfortunately, some people
who adopt them don’t know
what they’re getting into, and
are simply not ready to take
care of the shelled beasts,
whose average lifespan is typically
20-to-30 years, but often
longer, and who grow to be
much larger than they were as
babies, requiring a bigger habitat
and more food.
So, every year, dozens of
people bring their pet turtles
to Prospect Park and unceremoniously
dump them in the
lake or elsewhere in the park,
Cramer says, fi guring it would
make sense to release it to live
with its kind.
The Parks Department,
however, warns against the
practice, and points out that
doing so is illegal.
“Prospect Park may feel
like a home away from home,
but it’s not an appropriate
permanent residence for discarded
pets — in fact, it’s
against the law to dump animals
in parks,” says Parks Department
spokesperson Anessa
Hodgson. “The red-eared
sliders that are found in the
pond have likely been introduced
by pet owners who could
no longer care for them.”
Cramer says that the abandoned
sliders often cannot
survive on their own in the
park — they are not capable
of feeding themselves, having
been fed by humans their
whole life. They are also not
acquainted with wild turtles’
cycle of brumation, a kind of
light hibernation that many
reptiles partake in over the
winter.
At the park, turtles brumate
under the water, often
burrowing holes into the
muddy bed at the lake bottom.
“The turtles don’t know
how to fi nd their own food,
they don’t go into hibernation
at the right time,” Cramer
said. “Many of them don’t
make it through the winter.”
The ones that do survive
wreak havoc on the park’s delicate
ecosystem.
Red-eared sliders are listed
by the Global Invasive Species
Database as one of the 100
most harmful invasive species
on the planet. They are
often larger, faster, smarter,
more aggressive, and more
adaptable than the turtles already
living in a given area,
allowing them to outcompete
the slower and smaller native
species, such as painted
turtles, which once were plentiful
in city parks but have
been largely replaced by sliders,
along with yellow-bellied
sliders and musk turtles.
Red-eared sliders also are less
wary of humans than many
other species of turtles.
“They’re faster, they’re
pretty smart, and they push
out the turtles that normally
might live there,” Cramer
said. “The only ones that they
don’t push out are the snapping
turtles, which are much
bigger.”
Those that lived as pets can
also develop diseases in captivity
that are unfamiliar to
wild turtle species, infecting
them with a potentially deadly
condition.
And, as more and more
sliders have been dumped in
the lake over the years, they
do what all animals do and reproduce,
creating a surging
population within the park.
The Invasive Species Initiative
notes that they reach sexual
maturity at a young age
and are highly fecund; in 2019,
the Prospect Park Alliance
sent out an alert asking parkgoers
to leave turtles alone if
they saw them away from the
lake, as they were en route to
nest and lay eggs.
But for the most part, experts
say, the turtles in the
park consist of those that
have been dumped, as the
land around the lake in urban
parks is typically not suitable
for a turtle to lay eggs, though
that’s less the case in Prospect
than in others.
Because so many people
dump their pets, sliders have
taken over bodies of water in
parks all over the city.
“Every pond in New York
City, especially in the parks,
has a thriving population of
red eared sliders that are kicking
out native turtles,” said
Allen Salzberg, publisher of
the HerpDigest newsletter and
a fellow member of the Turtle
and Tortoise Society.
The phenomenon is not
limited to New York or even
the United States, as the turtles
have been traded as pets
all across the world, and their
proliferation has become an
issue as far away as Thailand.
Salzberg says they are what’s
known as “subsidized invasives,”
species that would normally
not be able to survive in
the area, but nonetheless have
a thriving population because
of abandonment.
“The population still
thrives because people keep
throwing their ex-pet turtles
in there,” Salzberg said. “And
you can still buy them, even
though it’s illegal.”
Cramer says that those interested
in getting a pet turtle
should consider adopting an
adult.
“It would make a lot more
sense for them to get a turtle
that was full size,” she says.
“They would know how big it
is, how much room they need
for it, and it would stop more
tiny little turtles from being
abandoned later on as they
grow. It’s very painful, some of
the calls I get are really sad.”
They should also call organizations
like the Turtle
and Tortoise Society if they
are interested in adopting a
slider, rather than buying one
from a sketchy dealer, Cramer
says. While the Society no longer
has a formal adoption program,
they are able to facilitate
adoptions for those who
request one. They can also
help re-home a turtle that an
owner can no longer care for.
The absolute last thing
an overwhelmed pet owner
should do, she says, is dump it
in the park.
“They’re wonderful turtles,
I had one for 40 years,”
Cramer says. “To let them go,
people are not doing their pets
a favor. They’re killing them.”
A group of red-eared sliders and other turtles hang out on a rock at Prospect Park
Photo by Rhododendrites, Wikimedia Commons