Visiting Brydon Lagoon in Langley. Two turtle species present.

In the Lower Mainland, it is unusual to visit a local water body and find turtles.  I have lived here for thirty years and rarely seen them.  Yet, it was only a few days ago that I spotted some in Maple Ridge (click here for blog).  What was extra unusual in today's viewing was the fact that there were two separate species present.  Western painted turtles (left) are native to BC.  Red-eared sliders (right) are an introduced species and not native.  In fact, they are considered invasive.

With globalization and the burgeoning pet industry, we have seen a large number of introduced species take hold in environments where they never existed before.  Such occurrences may be beneficial to the local ecosystem, may be neutral, or may be harmful.  Harmful species are often identified as invasive.  Essentially that means that they take food and habitat away from native species.  The two main reasons for the harm they cause are their rapid rate of reproduction and the lack of natural enemies curbing their exponential growth.

How can a turtle be an invasive species?  Afterall, its just a turtle!  Yet they breed about 10 times faster than their main competition and will eat just about anything.  They will not have an immediate impact, but rest assured that it will take less than a century to completely wipe out the western painted turtle from places where the two species are found together.  Not only that, they will expand their current range because of their quickly increasing numbers and the fact that people will release their overgrown pet turtles into the wild as a humane way to deal with the developing problem.  

Eventually, western painted turtles will be extinct in Canada.  They will join the ranks of other extinct Canadian species such as the great auk, the Labrador duck, and the passenger pigeon.  Saving them is really about maintaining planet biodiversity.  It may sound like small potatoes, but there are few things that are more important.  It will come down to education, effort, and elimination of the invasive threat.

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