yes i know but its been too cold. cant make gas money back at $3.85 a gallon. water's too cold to run on a large scale. its all about making money at this point. a few snappers can be caught but it is better to let the water warm up then the turtles will respond better to bait. many are still feeding on water vegetation.

Ya me to

Who's taking the photos of you?

Ya

I've never done any turtle trapping....but i know plenty spots loaded with um.... sounds like something good to check out for the summer

Ya it's fun

Cant wait until opening day just under a month away. getting bait ready though.

Bad news for commercial turtle trappers:

The market price has crashed.Check with your turtle buyer.

i ve got buyers on here contacting me. i havent heard anything unless its recently happened. no matter. we ll have the worlds largest turtle fry. lol sent you a pm anyway newt.

mousie


getting bait ready for season. individually wrapped and heading to the deep freeze.

How recent would this be Newt? Must be very recent I have heard nothing not even any rumblings

Guess it's good I don't sell them, if the price went and crashed. I haven't cleaned one yet this year, but I currently have 7 in my holding tank, so I need to cook a sauce and put some the rest in the freezer, soon. I even released a couple loggerheads this year. Just curious, do you know why the price dropped? I would have thought that the Asians would be buying just as many, since they already overfished their own turtles...

China turned the spicket off several months ago. I haven,t heard if it came back on.

They have enteral problems. I understand it has to do with changes in power or their form of elections.

They were getting cheaper and harder to move in quantity late last summer and fall. I expected it as the same problems that affect the fur mkt. are depressing the live turtle mkt. China again.

I gotcha. Speaking of snapping turtles, some of you may find this video interesting. It was filmed back in the 80s, I guess, some of the fellas catching them are from my neck of the woods. I thought it was an interesting video, even down to the commercial fishermen saying themselves that there wouldn't be any alligator snappers left if the unregulated trapping continued.

I would have loved to have seen what it was like to trap snappers back in the early days.

As much water and limited access there is in La. I don,t see how you could trap the turtles out especially with a low market price. Even the predators.

It'd take a whole lot of trapping, that's for sure.

Sure, there's plenty of water that has never been trapped. I realize that.

However, when you think about how long it takes for turtles to reach sexual maturity, the odds stacked against a turtle egg, how many people eat them here, and how easy they are to catch..... it's just a matter of "getting ahead" of the turtle numbers.

I'm not advocating shutting down commercial turtle trapping, I'm just saying that catching them faster than they reproduce happens, and it has happened in a lot of places.

You been reading too much junk. They shut us down here. You want to help turtles catch coons, shoot crows. You don,t see them promoting that do you.

A snapper can have fertile eggs for years without being bred. Do they tell you that? NO.

One of the biggest killers of small snappers are the large males. Promote your programs with targets of removing the large males.

I cant stop singing this song when people talk about turtles.

Turtles and (This word is unacceptable on Trapperman): http://youtu.be/Vf22Bhn5lZU

I'm with Kirk.
A few years back I caught the largest turtle I have ever seen.
On a river that at least 4 of us commercial turtle have trapped since the early 70's. He weighted 68.75 pounds. To let you know how many turtle I handle. In the last two years I caught,bought and sold over 125,00 pounds

Let me say this in a way that isn't taken as rude....

First of all, don't tell me what I have or haven't read. I know that they don't have to breed every year, they can keep the semen.

As I said, I am not advocating for ending commercial season. Just because they can be trapped out of one pond, doesn't mean that there aren't healthy populations in just about every waterhole a person can imagine.

Very few snappers reach adulthood, there are so many things that eat them. However, once they DO reach maturity, they can almost live forever. That works out for them, because they live for so long that the few that do make it, make up for the ones that didn't.

I do shoot every crow at my house that I can, not because of turtles, but because they are crows.

Don't try to make me look like I am against commercial trapping. A few people make a living doing it, and the rest just catch a few, so I think that their population is safe. They may get fished out of a certain area, but the population remains stable elsewhere. I understand that, but don't attack me, telling me what I read is junk, and don't tell me that they can't be trapped out if they are over harvested in a given area. Even the buffalo numbers got short, and I know the buffalo hunters probably argued otherwise.

As I said, I'm not trying to be rude, but I'm not going to have someone tell me that I'm spewing false information--you don't even know me.