It takes a village to get trafficked turtles home
New tools guide care and decision-making

Any kindergartener — or overconfident hare — can tell you turtles play the long game. Slow and steady wins the race, right?

But what if someone — like someone who traffics turtles — doesn’t play by the rules? One turtle taken illegally from its home to be sold overseas can leave a hole in its population that expands over time.  

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is working with state, nonprofit and academic partners to get poached native turtles back home. It can be a years-long process that relies on informed emergency response, sound long-term care and careful consideration of the risk to local populations.  

Not a slow-growing problem

At international ports across the country, our wildlife law enforcement officers facilitate the legal wildlife trade and combat wildlife trafficking. Wildlife inspectors screen mail and luggage for illicit cargo, and special agents investigate organized crime operations that deal in wildlife. John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York is a hot spot for native turtle smuggling.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service inspectors search packages for smuggled wildlife.

“Inspectors seize 600 - 1,000 native turtles a year at JFK,” said Tom Loring, special agent in our nearby New York Office of Law Enforcement. “Roughly 5 - 10% of my investigative work is native turtles.”

And that’s likely a small portion of the overall numbers leaving the country illegally.

While people caught trafficking turtles may eventually pay fines or go to jail, what happens to the turtles? Skilled care and suitable accommodations are critical to their survival. If criminal charges are filed, the animals could need housing for months or years, while the case works its way through court. Some are placed with accredited zoos that offer specialized care, but those that are healthy enough may be returned to the wild to bolster declining populations.

Populations of native U.S. turtles — including box, spotted, wood, bog and Blanding’s, along with diamondback terrapin — are declining. While habitat loss and vehicle strikes are ongoing threats, poaching has increased substantially in recent years. Turtles are smuggled by the tens and hundreds to both domestic and foreign markets to be sold as pets, used in belief-based practices or turned into products and souvenirs.

One turtle lost to poaching can have an outsize effect on an entire population. Depending on the species, turtles may not reproduce until they’re 20 years old. Though they can live to 100, their eggs and hatchlings are on the menu of nearly every predator, and an individual may need to reproduce throughout its lifetime just to replace itself in the population.  

Spotted turtle

The Collaborative to Combat the Illegal Trade in Turtles, or CCITT, brings partners together to better understand and address trafficking of native North American turtles. As co-chairs of its Repatriation and Confiscations Working Group, Julie Thompson-Slacum, from our Chesapeake Bay Field Office, and David Collins, coordinator of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums SAFE American Turtles program, created guidance for treating seized turtles — called Time of Confiscation Protocols — and decision tools for getting them back where they belong.

"When native turtles are removed from the wild, their direct contributions to conservation go with them,” Thompson-Slacum said. “It takes a lot of decision-making and resources at a lot of different levels to get them back out there where they can help their populations.”

In 2021, the Service awarded a $250,000 Competitive State Wildlife Grant to the Commonwealth of Virginia to perform disease screening and genetic analysis on confiscated native turtles throughout the eastern U.S. The grant, which continues through 2025, ensures repatriated turtles won’t bring sickness or incompatible genes into wild populations, while expanding the genetic library for native turtles.

The State Wildlife Grants program helps state and territorial wildlife agencies support species at risk of steep population declines, in hopes of preempting their listing as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act. Since 2002, the Service has awarded more than $1.3 billion through this grant program.

"Trauma victims"

Seized box turtles wrapped in socks

By the time turtles are seized by law enforcement, they’re often weeks and worlds away from their homes. People paid to smuggle may collect large numbers of turtles before sending them to a go-between to repackage and ship overseas. Turtles are stuffed in socks or wrapped in tape so they can’t move and make noise. Environmental stress and lack of food and water suppress their immune systems, and diseases like herpesvirus, adenovirus, ranavirus and mycoplasm can spread quickly in cramped conditions.

“I liken them to trauma victims — they need intensive care very quickly,” said Amanda Fischer, coordinator of AZA’s Wildlife Confiscations Network.

Fischer, whose salary is paid by the Service through a memorandum of understanding with AZA, is available 24/7. She manages a database of vetted facilities — not just zoos and aquariums but universities, nature centers and wildlife rescue centers — that meet AZA’s standards for caring for wildlife in need. No organization is too big or too small to join the network.

CCITT’s Time of Confiscation Protocols for native turtles prescribe safe, secure housing with proper environmental conditions and hydration, pending transport to longer-term holding facilities.

“Our goal is to get these turtles from law enforcement to a dedicated care facility, ideally within 24 hours,” Collins said.

Can they go home again?

The need for housing is great, and even the best accommodations can’t match natural conditions.

“Native turtles are unique in that they have a chance at rewilding; a lot of other species that are coming into the United States from outside don't have that opportunity,” Fischer said. “If there are native turtles and they're caught before they leave our borders, that gives them a shot at going back to the wild.”  

Confiscated spotted turtles

But even if a turtle survives being poached, smuggled and recovered, it’s not home free. The effects of releasing a sick turtle — or one from another part of the country — may be harmful, even catastrophic, to a wild population.  

“Our goal is to build a pathway from confiscation back to a conservation outcome,” Collins said. “Our biggest concern is that we do nothing that would jeopardize wild populations.”

Thompson-Slacum and Collins created decision tools — case studies, a decision tree and a decision key — to inform the fate of confiscated turtles based on their health, information about their origins and suitable release sites.  

While a sick turtle may pose an immediate threat, release of a genetically dissimilar one can affect the population long term. Over thousands of years, turtles of the same species have evolved to survive in conditions specific to their home areas. A turtle from the north released in the south not only may be ill-suited to the summer’s heat; when it reproduces, it can alter the genetic makeup of the population, making future generations less robust.  

If a person caught smuggling won't, or can’t, share the poaching location, sometimes DNA can do the talking. An ever-growing database of genetic information for native turtles can match an individual to the region of the country — or for wood turtles, watershed — it came from. The more turtles tested, the more useful the database becomes.

Finding the right spot

In 2018, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation seized nearly 300 turtles from a single residence, one of the largest wildlife confiscations in state history. More than half were spotted turtles.  

Virginia State Herpetologist J.D. Kleopfer holds a spotted turtle before releasing it to the wild.

Three years later, the Service funded genetic analysis of spotted turtle populations along the entire Eastern Seaboard, conducted by Virginia Commonwealth University. When the work was complete, the confiscated spotted turtles were tested, and eight matched the genetics of a population in central Virginia.  

J.D. Kleopfer, state herpetologist with the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources, used the decision tree and decision key to screen the eight turtles for repatriation. He knew a location with suitable habitat where they wouldn’t jeopardize an existing population. They were transferred to the Wildlife Center of Virginia in June 2024, where staff did thorough health exams and tested for common illnesses.

“The decision tools give us a very clear pathway to get where we need to go,” he said. “The process is peer-reviewed and professionally acceptable.”  

Kleopfer returned the eight turtles to the wild, where they have a chance to help their species, in August 2024.

“To see these turtles swim off into their new home after being in captivity for six years was both professionally and personally rewarding,” he said. “Too often the endgame for these animals isn’t so bright. Many suffer or die while in the hands of poachers, whose business model is based on sheer numbers, hoping a handful survive the trip to their final destination.”

When in Jersey ...

Brian Zarate, principal zoologist with the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, Fish and Wildlife, uses the Time of Confiscation Protocols and decision tools to advise facilities about native turtles.

“When we have a facility that's holding turtles, we can work with those partners to provide guidance on what the care should look like and do the different steps we need to do to make a decision about what's next for those animals,” he said.

These two box turtles appeared eager to return to the wild.

In addition to confiscations by law enforcement, Zarate works with turtles that were taken from the wild, perhaps decades ago, and held legally by private citizens, nature centers, zoos or aquariums.  

“We can put all the turtles through the same process, follow guidance on what their care should look like, listen to the experts, and form an opinion that fits New Jersey,” he said.

Zarate applied the decision tools to two groups of eastern box turtles — 41 that lived in an outdoor enclosure for more than a decade and 31 seized by law enforcement and held at a rehabilitation facility for 14 months — using genetic testing and multiple rounds of health screenings.  

Each box turtle was fitted with a radio transmitter so researchers can track its movements.

While genetic results traced the seized turtles to New Jersey, the origins of the long-term captives could be narrowed to only “the Northeast.” Zarate was okay with that.

Populations of box turtles in the eastern U.S. show little genetic variation, perhaps because, historically, the species was widespread. In New Jersey, where roads and development carve wildlife habitat into increasingly smaller pieces, the chances for genetic mixing between populations are slim.  

“For New Jersey, I felt that there was more benefit to potentially adding new genetic material into one of these intact, protected land environments,” he said. “We may be helping introduce genetic material that may not get to that spot naturally.”

In August 2024, Zarate led the release of 68 of the turtles, each wearing a radio transmitter so researchers can track its movements until at least spring 2026. He hopes to learn how long it takes the turtles to settle into their new surroundings and how many survive their first year-plus of freedom.  

“I have 80 more turtles going through the screening process now,” he said. “I hope this project gives us a good foundation and a gut check about the process, a lot of information we can apply to the next round.”

Risk versus reward  

While no one wants to harm a wild turtle population, long-term housing is limited, and pre-release screening is expensive and time-consuming. When might it make sense to forego testing?  

As graduate students and Pathways interns for the Service, Desireé Smith and Ednita Tavarez-Jimenez pursued that question. They helped Evan Grant, research wildlife biologist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Eastern Ecological Science Center, create a model to forecast and quantify the risk of harm to a wild population from releasing a turtle without disease and genetic testing. Results should be available in 2025.

“When is it most valuable to conduct disease and genetic testing?” Grant said. “The model will provide the science to support using resources most efficiently to conserve wild native turtle populations.”

Meanwhile, both Smith and Tavarez-Jimenez have completed their degrees and now work for the Service as wildlife inspectors, Smith in Atlanta and Tavarez-Jimenez in New York City.  

They’re the newest members of a dedicated group of professionals, academics and volunteers working to keep native turtles in the wild.

Learn how you can help turtles.

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