A week or so into a new job in Beijing not many months ago, young American journalist Wendy Lee joined friends for a meal at a popular restaurant in the Chinese capital.
The California native's Chinese was a bit rusty, so when time came to order her meal she let one of her friends pick the dish.
"The waiter came back carrying a live turtle in a bag and showed it to us," Lee recalled last week during a gathering of journalists.
The turtle was to be the main course of the group dinner, she learned.
Later, in Hong Kong, Lee discovered a popular dessert, often sold on the street, that "looks like brown Jello, but doesn't taste like it," has ground turtle shell as one of its ingredients.
Turtle, as Lee came to realize during her stay in China, is a hugely popular dish in this largest of Asian nations.
And that popularity coupled with a thriving China's integration into the world economy has created trouble for Texas turtles.
A drain on population
Many of the turtles being consumed in China today come from Texas waterways. And that drain on Texas turtle population has wildlife managers, biologists and others with interest in natural resources concerned about the impact of the nearly unregulated harvest on the state's wild turtles.
Demand for turtles as food has stripped China of its wild turtle populations. So, while commercial turtle farms are springing up in the country, much of the demand for food turtles is being met through importing turtles.
Texas has become a source of that supply.
For the past several years, tens of thousands of Texas turtles have annually been collected from the wild and shipped, live, to the Far East where they've ended up on plates.
According to admittedly imprecise data collected by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department through its eight-year-old non-game permit system, an average of about 95,000 wild-caught Texas turtles annually are being collected or purchased by dealers.
Some of those turtles — diamondback terrapins, box turtles — are destined for the domestic and international pet trade.
But the majority — common snapping turtles, softshells, musk and mud and map turtles and red-eared sliders — are fated for the food market.
Data collected by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which monitors export of wildlife, documented 256,638 Texas turtles exported through the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, alone, from 2002-05.
The majority of those quarter-million turtles were "food" turtles.This development of the turtle trade caught Texas wildlife officials somewhat by surprise.
"We are moving into an area where there is a demand — a seemingly unlimited demand — for a resource that wasn't there, before," Matt Wagner, director of TPWD's wildlife diversity program, told the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission at an April 4 meeting.
Turtles — with the exception of a handful of species, such as sea turtles, designated as endangered or threatened — fall into the broad category of "non-game" wildlife under Texas law.
And Texas law long has put few, if any, restrictions on taking of non-game wildlife.
Until 1999, when TPWD created the non-game collection and dealer permit system, a hunting license was the only document required to take and sell unlimited numbers of non-game wildlife.
Prior to the rise of the foreign markets, commercial harvest of Texas' turtles and other non-game wildlife such as snakes and lizards was limited, and the liberal non-game regulations deemed sufficient.
But over the past decade, the booming commercial market in non-game wildlife, especially turtles, has triggered alarms.
Turtle populations are particularly susceptible to overharvest. They are long-lived and take years (as long as a decade for some species) to reach sexual maturity. Adult turtles have low reproduction rates (some box turtles lay only a pair of eggs per year) and high mortality of eggs.
Commercial harvest of adult turtles can send a population spiraling, and such harvest is not sustainable for long, as China and other counties have found and several recent scientific studies on turtle population in the United States underscore.
Texas is one of a handful of states allowing unlimited harvest of turtles and other non-regulated non-game wildlife. But that could change.
At its meeting this month, the TPW Commission approved a staff recommendation to officially propose rules revamping the state's regulations governing commercial harvest of non-game wildlife.
Proposal under review
Under that proposal, commercial harvest and collection of non-game wildlife would be limited to 84 species on a "white list" drafted by TPWD staff. That proposed list includes 11 species of frogs and toads, one salamander, two mammals, 45 snakes, 18 lizards and no turtles.
Commercial harvest of all wild-caught turtles would be prohibited under the draft regulations.
"Clearly, today, the days of market hunting have passed," Joseph Fitzsimons, commission chairman, said during the meeting.
The proposed regulations will be subject to public comment over the next few weeks.
TPWD will consider those comments when drafting a final recommendation for the TPW Commission to consider for adopting at its May 24 public meeting in Austin.
If the commission approves sweeping changes in the state's regulation of commercial harvest of non-game wildlife, Texas turtles could become much less common on menus in restaurants halfway around the world.
And the reptiles would stand a much better chance of remaining vital pieces of the amazingly complex and hugely important natural mosaic of life on the Texas landscape.
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