Animal · United States, Canada
Common snapping turtle
Chelydra serpentina — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The common snapping turtle is a heavy freshwater turtle from North America with a hooked beak and a long, saw-toothed tail. It spends most of its life underwater, half buried in mud, waiting for fish, frogs and water plants to drift past.
Picture credit: Dmitriy Aseev (CC BY 4.0) · George Chernilevsky (CC BY 4.0) · Maxime Laterreur (CC BY 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the common snapping turtle live?
Home: in ponds, slow rivers and marshes.
In the wild it lives in these countries: the United States, Canada.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: shell about 25–47 cm long. It weighs about 10 kilograms. On the menu: both plants and meat.
The story behind it
A snapping turtle lives in ponds, slow rivers and marshes, and often rests on the bottom with only its eyes and nostrils above the mud. Its shell is rough and dark and is often covered in algae, which helps it disappear against the muddy floor. Underwater the turtle is calm and swims away from people, but on land it cannot pull itself into its small shell, so it hisses and snaps instead. It eats fish, frogs, insects, dead animals and a surprising amount of water plants. In early summer the female leaves the water and may walk hundreds of metres to dig a nest in sandy soil, where she lays roughly 20 to 80 round eggs. She covers them and goes back to the water, and the young dig their way out weeks later. Whether the hatchlings become male or female depends on how warm the nest was. Snapping turtles grow slowly and can live for several decades.
Find it on the globe
Common snapping turtle is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Why is it called a snapping turtle?
On land it cannot pull its head and legs fully into its small shell, so it defends itself by lunging forward with an open mouth. The quick snap looks frightening, yet the same turtle in the water almost always simply swims away.
Can it really bite through a broom handle?
No. Measurements show a strong but not superhuman bite, enough to hurt a hand badly and to mark soft wood, and the broomstick stories are exaggerated. The sensible rule is to look, not touch, and never to pick the animal up.
What does it do in winter?
It settles under the ice into mud or under a bank and hardly moves for months. It can take in some oxygen through the thin skin inside its mouth and throat, so it does not have to come up to breathe.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
Last checked: