7 turtles that likely drowned in crab traps wash up on Southold beach, officials say

Seven diamondback terrapins, members of a turtle population that authorities say is declining, washed up dead on a Southold beach, state environmental officials said.

Karen Testa, executive director of Turtle Rescue of the Hamptons, said the seven — all females of breeding age — likely drowned in crab traps. They were bloated but displayed “no marks, no trauma — we see this often,” she said. “Turtles breathe air,” and die if they are trapped too long underwater.

Testa said that someone walking Sunday on South Harbor Beach spotted the carcasses and called her organization; she in turn notified the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. An agency spokeswoman confirmed the deaths and said staff had shipped most of the turtles to a DEC Wildlife Pathology Lab in upstate Delmar for analysis.

Terrapins are attracted to the same oily animal scraps that fishermen use in crab traps. But because the state banned their capture for food in 2018, fishermen typically discard them when they find them in their traps, Testa said. “They dump them in the water like garbage.”

State regulations require that noncollapsible crab pots set in much of the state be equipped with terrapin excluder devices that keep most terrapins out while letting crabs in. New pots come equipped with the devices, but many older pots have not been retrofitted, Testa said.

 "Seven is a big deal," said John Turner, senior conservation policy advocate for Seatuck Environmental Association, a conservation group. He said the Long Island population of terrapins was probably in the low thousands. "Drowning in crab pots is one of the leading causes of mortality for the species," he said, along with a host of other ill-fated encounters with humans.

Other turtles die when they are hit by Jet Skis or crushed by motor vehicles on land, or fail to reproduce when bulkheads or other shoreline hardening blocks nesting areas. July is midway through terrapins' nesting season.

The latest state Wildlife Action Plan, from 2015, identified terrapins as a "Species of Greatest Conservation Need" because of “documented threats from habitat loss, nest predation, and incidental capture."

Hundreds of terrapins and tens of thousands of fish were found dead on a beach near Flanders Bay that year. 

Scientists from Cornell University, Stony Brook University, DEC and other institutions later determined the likely cause was a rare neurotoxin, known as saxitoxin, from an algal bloom. That discovery was published in the April 2017 issue of the science journal Toxicon.