Turtle harvest at standstill

PRAIRIE CITY - Efforts to restrict commercial harvest of the state's wild turtles have come to at least a temporary stalemate.

'I'm not sure whether a season is warranted at this time,” Natural Resources Commission member Kim Francisco said following a meeting last month of Iowa's wild turtle working group.

'More study is necessary,” said commission member Marcus Branstad, following the Sept. 17 meeting at the Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge.

The stakeholders group - which consists of commission members, Department of Natural Resources officials, commercial harvesters and environmental activists - generally agreed that more research is required to justify closing the harvest season until after July 15 each year to give turtles a better chance to reproduce.

Although 'you can never have enough research,” according to Iowa State University ecologist Fred Janzen, the turtle expert said he thinks state officials already know enough to justify additional protection for wild Iowa turtles.

'Agencies in surrounding states have been protecting turtles or eliminating commercial harvest altogether, and there is no reason to believe they have not based their rules on reasonable data,” Janzen said.

But turtles in Iowa can sustain commercial harvest, according to David Sells of Crawfordsville, who has trapped and raised turtles for 25 years.

More than 60 percent of the harvest would be eliminated by the proposed late start to the season, Sells said.

'The DNR just figured they could ram it down our throats,” said Michael 'Red” O'Hearn of Northboro, a commercial turtle harvester for the past two decades.

Contrary to the DNR's assertion that commercial harvest of turtles is unsustainable, O'Hearn said, 'There are thousands and thousands that will die of old age or get run over by cars” if they are not harvested.

In 2009 the Center for Biological Diversity, concerned that high demand and prices for turtle meat were depleting wild populations, asked Iowa officials to ban the commercial harvest of turtles.

The Natural Resources Commission denied the request, citing a lack of evidence that humans hurt turtle populations.

The DNR, which since has expanded its turtle research, proposed in February that the state's current year-round open season be closed from Jan. 1 to July 15.

Doing so, the DNR said, would prevent harvest of turtles during much of the their nesting season.

From a sample of about 1,000 snapping turtles collected in southeast Iowa from 2010 to 2013, DNR researchers concluded that 'few if any Iowa common snapping turtles are reaching historically documented maximum sizes” and that 'the lack of large female common snappers may be the reason for poor recruitment.”

That recent southeast Iowa data, they concluded, establishes 'real concern for the future of Iowa turtles.”

A DNR analysis of 2014 commercial harvest data, which licensed harvesters are required to report, showed a harvest of 17,504 turtles, mostly snappers, with a combined weight of 182,000 pounds and an estimated wholesale value of $272,860.

The 2014 harvest was down 56,000 pounds from the preceding year - a dramatic decline that the DNR acknowledged could have been caused by weakened demand, unfavorable weather, the inability of the resource to sustain itself in the face of unrestricted commercial harvest or some combination of the three.

Since 1987, as contiguous states have restricted or eliminated commercial turtle harvests, the Iowa harvest of wild turtles has increased sevenfold and the number of commercial license holders has increased fourfold.

The Iowa DNR 'has not presented a scientific and procedurally credible argument in defense of its proposed partial closure of commercial turtle harvest in Iowa,” said John D. Aquilino Jr., executive director of the International Foundation for the Conservation of Natural Resources, in a white paper analyzing the proposal.

Aquilino said a realistic, science-based determination on the need to limit harvest cannot be made without reliable scientific and Iowa-centric data on each of the four commercial turtle species.

If that data, once gathered and analyzed, show a season is required, 'support for that effort should be very nearly universal,” he said.

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