Turtle farming
[5] The one in Australia's Torres Strait Islands folded after a few years of operation,[5] and the one in Réunion has been converted to a public aquarium (Kélonia).
[8][9] By the early 20th century, Hattori's farm had about 13.6 hectares of turtle ponds; it was reported to produce 82,000 eggs in 1904, and 60,000 animals of market size in 1907.
[10] According to the report of the Japanese zoologist Kakichi Mitsukuri, who conducted a significant amount of research at Hattori's farm in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the main food supplied to the turtles was crushed bivalve mollusks, Mactra veneriformis (シオフキガイ, shiofuki, in Japanese), from Tokyo Bay.
[8] Hattori's company has survived into the 21st century, as the Hattori-Nakamura Soft-Shelled Turtle Farm, operating in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture.
[14][15] A later report by the same team (Shi Haitao, James F. Parham, et al.), published in January 2008, was based on an attempt to survey all 1,499 turtle farms that were registered with the appropriate authorities of the People's Republic of China (namely, the Endangered Species Import and Export Management Office, and the Forestry Bureaus of individual provinces).
[1] The farms were mostly located in China's southern provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi, Hainan, and Hunan,[1] although more recent sources indicate Zhejiang as particularly important.
[1] In a report from a Tunchang County, Hainan, turtle farm, published by James F. Parham and Shi Haitao in 2000, the researchers give a general idea of such an enterprise.
The adult turtles lived in an 8 hectares (20 acres) outdoor breeding area, while the young ones were kept in indoor raising ponds.
As early as 1993, researchers noted the existence of several hundred families near Hai Duong raising various amphibians and reptiles, including turtles.
[12] Still, a turtle farm operated in Iowa as of 1999,[25] and in 2012, red-ear sliders raised in Oklahoma were reported to be sold in Virginia and Maryland's Asian supermarkets.
[28] The industry is said to have started "70-some years" ago (i.e., in the 1930s) with farmers collecting eggs laid by wild turtles, getting them to hatch, and selling the hatchlings as pets.
They raise green sea turtles, primarily for their meat, a traditional food in Caymanian culture which was increasingly scarce in the wild.
[39] Turtle farms in Eastern Europe, in particular in North Macedonia, supply animals to pet shops in EU countries.
[41] As the conservation expert Peter Paul van Dijk noted, the farmed turtles gradually replace wild-caught ones in the open markets of China, with the percentage of farm-raised individuals in the "visible" trade growing from around 30% in 2000 to around 70% around 2007.
[14] However, he and other experts caution that turtle farming creates extra pressure on the wild populations, as farmers commonly believe in the superiority of wild-caught breeding stock and place a premium on wild-caught breeders, which may create an incentive for turtle hunters to seek and catch the last remaining wild specimens of some species.
