Whooohooo.. just caught a 30lb snapper!

[Parnell]

I looked up the regs, out of curiousity.  Guess it's cool to harvest.  Congrats.

[Badger]

  Parnell, the common snapper and the alligator snapper are quite a bit different. What he has is a common snapper, a very large full grown adult. I don't believe they are in any kind of risk at becomming rare. I am kind of a turtle lover myself.

[PEARL DRUMS]

 Im a turtle soup lover! Badger what woudl you guess its age at? 30-50 maybe?

[osage outlaw]

I hate to see turtles hit on the road.  They don't have a chance.  I hope I never see someone hit one on purpose     But, if I find one that's already dead, then I try to save it's skull.  I have no problem with someone legally taking them to eat.  I don't eat them so I don't kill them.

[Badger]

  I looked it up, they get bigger than I thought, up to 85# and live about 40 years. Yours must be about 15 roughly.

[mcginnis6010]

yea i eat them when i catch them the limit here in Virginia is 5 a day. i have actually seen an alligator snapping turtle in a local zoo about an hour from here that weighed 300lbs and was 150 yrs, old it was incredible. My wife told be to never bring anything that big back home lol.

[gstoneberg]

Snappers are real predators.  We had a 3 acre pond and they are a serious threat to anything that swims.  We had a wood duck take 19 ducklings down to the water and between the turtles and the bass there were 3 left the next day and none left the following day.  Most any evening I could sit on the deck and see a half dozen pop their heads up every half hour or so.  To put a bass on a stringer was to feed a snapper there.  Most people never see them, but there are a lot more of them around than you think.  Interestingly, while I've seen lots and lots of adults, I've only seen 2 juveniles.  I don't know where they go until they reach adulthood.  The largest I've seen in the wild was 25lbs and I found it on the road.  Most are between 10 and 20lbs.

George

[Parnell]

Growing up in Illinois, I saw both, I'm thinking.  Saw many a duckling, gosling, whatever baby swans are, taken down.  We'd find them in drainage ditches, and yards.  In the morning dew you'd see their wide trails going from the pond in our backyard to the lake across the way.  I had a buddy who found a dead alligator snapper in his lake.  It was a monster, I recall.  When they cleaned up the animal they found a musket-ball inside, under the shell.