SHELL SHOCK
Abandoned terrapins who have made new home in city lake surprise park visitors
IF YOU’ve ever visited Roath Park Lake in Cardiff over the past few decades, you might have spotted a somewhat unusual creature that has made its home in the park’s waters. Photographs have appeared regularly on social media of terrapins swimming in the lake or basking on its rocks and surrounding greenery.
However, the terrapins were never meant to make the lake their home, and the story behind how they got there involves a popular 1990s cartoon.
“The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle craze back in the late Nineties is part of it,” Gareth Stamp, a community park ranger, explained.
“People were buying little terrapins which were about the size of a 50p,or a little bit bigger, and they didn’t realise that they grew and that they needed a lot more care than they thought. That was the biggest problem.”
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, which was adapted from the comic books, premiered in the UK in 1990 and was aired until 1997. It then re-surfaced on CBBC between 2002 and 2004.
“They [the terrapins] were freely available in pet shops” Gareth, who has been a community park ranger for nearly 19 years, said.
“I think it was just kids saying to their parents ‘I really want a terrapin’ and then you go out and buy one and, before they knew it, they grew and grew and became very difficult to keep because they became more expensive and needed more space.
“Therefore, they were just released into lakes.”
Gareth said that there are around 4,000 terrapins in the wild in the UK, and he believes the terrapins in the lake to be from the period during the time the cartoon was aired, when they became popular in pet shops.
The lifespan of a pond terrapin is around 30 years, according to the RSPCA.
“We’ve found old shells of deceased terrapins in the past, so we do know that they’re reaching old age, but we’ve never found any evidence of tiny ones,” Gareth said.
Despite the terrapins having occupied the lake for a number of years now, Gareth said there doesn’t appear to be any evidence of their numbers growing.
“Terrapins require specific conditions for breeding – water temperature, ground temperature for preparing the eggs, all that kind of stuff – and I don’t think the UK is really conducive to that.”
Gareth said that some of the older terrapins at the bottom of the lake have reached the size of a dinner plate: “It a lways causes a bit of a stir when people see them basking on the rocks,” he said.
However, Gareth said the terrapins are notoriously hard to catch, which is part of the reason why they have stayed in the lake for so long.
“Once they bask and get up their core temperature, they are extremely active. If you try to catch a terrapin in its domain, on a log or in the water, you won’t even get close to one,” he said.
“I have found a couple by the side of the lake in the spring, when they’ve just come out of hibernation and they’re not very warm. They will allow you to approach and I have been able to just pick them up and put them in a box to relocate them to the conservatory.
“I think we spent about two or three days trying to catch one, and failed, so it’s not a feasible option I’m afraid.”
Gareth said if the terrapins were having a detrimental effect on the lake’s ecosystem, the rangers would have to do something about it. However, he believes that, as there are only between 15 and 20, which aren’t breeding, their impact is fairly low.
In 2002, a plan was launched to capture the park’s terrapins and fly them to a warmer climate in Tuscany. However it appears the plan was unsuccessful.
When they have been able to catch them, the park rangers relocate the terrapins to the nearby conservatory, where they are fed and looked after by staff.
There are currently about 20 in the conservatory, but not all of them have come from the park’s lake, with some being taken in from unwanted homes.
“We never intended to have terrapins in the conservatory, it just sort of happened as we took in pets and things like that and then we had the ones from the lake as well so the numbers have just steadily built up,” Gareth explained.
However, the conservatory has now reached its capacity, and the rangers have had to turn away requests to rehome unwanted terrapins.
The terrapins on the lake source their own food. As omnivores, terrapins eat both meat and vegetation, and Gareth says the ones in Roath Park feed on fish, insects, reeds and even small ducklings sometimes.
Gareth says most of the terrapins in the lake are red-eared terrapins, native to the southern United States and Northern Mexico, and yellow-bellied terrapins, native to the south-eastern United
States.