“Terrapins Can Be Grown … as Readily as Chickens”

[Todd Stockwell]

Todd Stockwell

November 21, 2001 at 12:15 am #16303

To conclude the excerpts from the October 1947 “Nature” magazine article on the US Fishery Station’s captive breeding program at Beaufort, NC: “The experiments at Beaufort have demonstrated that terrapins can be grown in confinement nearly as readily as chickens.” “Fortunately, from a commercial standpoint, a ratio of only about one male to six females has occurred among animals grown in captivity. Such a sex ratio is excellent for breeding purposes because it insures a high degree of fertility of the eggs.” “The operation of private terrapin “farms,” or coastal storage and feeding pens, was a profitable enterprise prior to World War I. One of the first of these was the Barbee Terrapin Farm, near Savannah, Ga., established in 1898, where a considerable quantity of terrapin has been canned in the past. Most of those terrapin farms, however, consisted of pens, often called “crawls,” in which the animals were placed and fed in order to gain growth, or merely to be held for a better market.”

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