[Image Description: There is a turtle in the center of this photo! The photo is very closely cropped around the turtle, who is standing on a sunny rock, with a greenish pond in the background. The turtle has a very muddy shell. Its limbs and head are outstretched, and you can see a stripe of red behind its eye, and bands of yellow on its jaw and leg.]
My frequent Adventure Companion is a big time number one fan of turtles, which means I have developed a fondness for these critters as well, and have tried to get quite a few photos of them over the years. I saw this one last June in NYC, when I was wandering around the greener parts of Central Park. A slightly different shot of this same turtle (and its buddy!) graces the header of this very blog.
Despite the New York origin, I wound up using www.massaudubon.org/ to ID this friend. Those bright red spots make it pretty clearly a Red-Eared Slider (Trachemys scripta elegans). Which, I was surprised to learn, is incredibly invasive. Enough so that it warranted inclusion in the Invasive Species Specialist Group’s list “100 of the World’s Worst Invasive Alien Species”! Now we go ooo and aah at the global tenacity of this Mississippi native.
Oooo! Aaaah!
They are _super_ illegal in Australia, and moderately illegal in the EU and Japan. Their invasiveness seems to be entirely from feral colonies formed from pets that have been released or escaped. Friends, if you get a pet animal, do not send that animal to live in the wild when you’re done with it. The *best* case scenario is that it gets almost immediately killed by something native because it’s not prepared. Worst case? They push out the natives, hog all the food, and transmit diseases to other animals and humans alike.
Photo Credit: I took this one! CC-BY-NC CitySpider 2017 (which means it’s with the old camera)
