Chesapeake Almanac Podcast
Episode 7: May: Diamondback Terrapin Mating
Copyright © John Page Williams Jr. All rights reserved.
This is John Page Williams with another reading from Chesapeake Almanac. This is the month of May and the title of this first sketch is "Diamondback Terrapin Mating."
There is a cove on the Patuxent several miles below Benedict that often appears to have several black sticks poking up a couple of inches above the water's surface. If a boat approaches one of these, it disappears, only to reappear in five or ten minutes. The patient observer will discover the sticks to be the heads of diamondback terrapins.
This month, though, the observer need not be so patient. Sometimes in May there are 200 heads bobbing in the cove, which is only 60 yards across. Indeed, there are often nearly 100 terrapin on the cove's marsh banks. This is the mating season.
Early on, the American colonists began eating terrapins. They were abundant and easy to catch. The supply seemed endless.
During the 19th century, the citizenry came to appreciate the terrapin as a gourmet food, especially in a rich stew laced with cream and sherry. In 1887, during the glory years of Crisfield's railroad, a seafood dealer from Philadelphia came down and developed a tremendous market, buying terrapin from waterman to next to nothing, keeping them in holding pens in the marshes where he fed them scraps from crab-picking houses and shipping them to the finest restaurants and clubs in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. LaVallette was able to control the market so tightly that he could dictate his selling price: one dollar per inch of width on the under shell of the terrapin. Thus a single female cost five to eight dollars, and a male three to six dollars. A dozen females could bring a hundred dollars in 1900. Bear in mind that those dollars were much bigger than ours are today.
Demand held up for 25 years, so watermen fished the diamondbacks hard. Other seafood dealers began to compete with LaVallette, and the inevitable happened: the harvest outran the ability of the resource to renew itself, and the supply dwindled. Laws were passed limiting the harvest, but the market was so lucrative that it continued illegally till there was so few terrapin left that packers no longer found them profitable.
Once they became difficult to obtain, terrapin dropped out of favor with all but a few. As the harvest came to a virtual standstill, the stocks began to rebuild themselves. There is still a law on the books prohibiting their capture in warmer months, and capturing them in winter is a skill that few watermen still possess. Though terrapin are difficult and messy to prepare, there's still a small market for them (the Maryland Club in Baltimore will always have terrapin stew on its menu). But at this point, harvest pressure is relatively light.
Thus there are more diamondbacks around now than there have been for years. They're pretty turtles, with slate-blue skin dotted with black spots. The shell is covered with distinctive, diamond-shaped concentric rings which may bear some relation to the animal's age during its first few years. Their feet are broad, flat paddles with claws, so they swim and walk well.
Terrapin prowl the Chesapeake's salt marshes, free from competition with their upriver cousins, feeding on periwinkles, fiddler crabs, worms, insects, and fish when they can catch them; they crush their food with powerful jaws. Terrapins are predators, not scavengers. They prefer unpolluted water and thus are indicators of healthy marsh systems.
The diamondback species (Malaclemys terrapin) ranges from the cord grass marshes of Massachusetts to the mangrove keys of the Florida Gulf Coast and then west to southern Texas and maybe beyond. Within that range, there's seven subspecies. Our own is the northern diamondback (Malaclemys t. terrapin), which lives from Cape Cod to Cape Hatteras and is considered the finest eating specimen of the lot.
The Chesapeake's diamondbacks winter in the mud, but as spring warms the water they emerge. Thus May on, the Patuxent finds them not only mating, but also simply absorbing spring sunlight on a warm marsh bank. Indeed, females do not necessarily mate every year. Apparently they can store sperm from one mating for up to four years, though the longer the female goes without mating, the fewer eggs will hatch.
The eggs will be laid later this month, in nests dug into sandy beaches. In some parts of the Eastern Shore low country, one occasionally finds a nest dug into a sand road next to a marsh. Serious egg-lovers like raccoons and black snakes will be busy from now through summer, looking for nests to rob. A depression in the sand filled with leathery, dried-up little white tubes signals a success for them. By late August, however, such a crater may well mean a new litter of one-inch terrapins.
They will then face another predator, the great blue heron. Fortunately for the species, there are plenty of other tasty morsels to compete for the heron's attention. Some will be lost to its stalking skill, but most will survive. The terrapin's major threats are loss of habitat and exploitation by man. As long as laws regulate destruction and alteration of coastal wetlands, and, perhaps more important, as long as people object to the mess involved in cleaning a few of these turtles, they will be around, unobtrusively going about their business. Look for them bobbing in the Bay's marsh coves this month.
For more happenings around the Bay in May see our other Chesapeake Almanac podcasts and read our blog posts "The Dirt on Soil Health" and "A Mahogany Tide in May."
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