Скачать или смотреть Mating Snapping Turtles Experimental Lakes Area ELA 20250727

While canoe camping in Experimental Lakes Area, ELA, on 2025 July 27 I heard a hissing sound coming from the water near camp. It sounded a bit like the sound I have heard river otters make. I was heading to my tent to get away from the twilight/dusk mosquitoes but stopped to take a look. What I saw did not look like an otter, was it two otters? Then I realized it was two snapping turtles mating "belly to belly". I decided to stay and record their apparent mating activity, despite the increasing mosquito onslaught. It seemed unusual, typically I have seen information where the male mounts the female on top from behind.

These are the common snapping turtle, Chelydra serpentina, common to lakes and streams in Northwestern Ontario and Manitoba.

The larger turtle is likely the male.

They clutch each other's carapace (top shell) with sharp claws, plastron to plastron ("belly to belly"), rolling and rotating in the water, taking turns poking their heads up to the surface to spout water and take a breath. They alternate between remaining motionless and then biting at each other's throat and thrashing about. Their tails extend and then come around to hug the back of the other's carapace, the bases of their tales pressing together. Males and females both have a "cloaca" which are orifices through which they defecate/urinate and includes their sexual organs. The male's cloaca is lower down the tail than the female's cloaca, situated so it can be pushed against the female's cloaca.

They will mate for a few hours, possibly because of low success of sperm transfer of mating while floating in water.

The mosquitoes got very bad so I made a couple recordings, patiently holding my camera while mosquitoes attacked my hands and head, then headed for my tent. If I had recorded the whole ritual to its conclusion my camera would have run out of memory and the mosquitoes would have carried me away.

You might think that the end of July is too late for them to be mating as there would not be enough time for the female to develop and lay eggs and for them to hatch before freeze up. However, the females can store sperm received from a male for long periods of time, months to over a year, to fertilize her eggs. Also, if the eggs are laid late in a season, they have the ability to overwinter, although I am not sure if this is known for this region where temperatures drop to -40C and colder.

The audio is removed from this video as there is commentary from myself and a friend who was watching that distracts from the event. The hissing and splashing sounds were barely audible in the recording.

DON'T PUT ANY FOOD, OR CLEAN YOUR DISHES, IN THE LAKE WATER!
Many people who are camping feed wilds turtles using their food. They may be doing this unknowingly by cleaning their eating utensils and plates in the water. This makes the turtles unafraid of humans and encourages them to come to areas they would otherwise avoid, resulting in them being harmed. Maybe snapping turtles and other wild animals are "cute" but they deserve a wild existence, we humans do enough damage to their ecosystems as it is.