Bonner has converted ten rooms of the 12-room house she shares with her environmental engineer husband, Mike Penko, into a turtle facility. In addition she teaches reptile clinical medicine to graduate students at Tufts University Wildlife Clinic in Grafton, Massachusetts. After Asia, the world's second-largest center of turtle diversity is the United States, where 54 species occupy every conceivable habitat from desert to coastal marsh. While Americans can do little to stop the turtle crisis underway in Southeast Asia, Bonner points out that they have the opportunity to keep U.S. turtles from suffering the same fate by strengthening regulations for their collecting and shipping. U.S. turtle species whose popularity as pets have placed them in obvious danger the gopher tortoise, desert tortoise, wood turtle, spotted turtle, Blanding's turtle and bog turtle, for example are protected by strict state and federal laws, but regulations for species that are not yet rare are thoroughly inadequate.
Chinese buyers are now in the United States and some of our turtles are being exported by the ton.
In its entire life, often more than a century, a turtle may produce only one surviving offspring. So adults represent an enormous genetic investment. Sustainable harvest of any species may be impossible. Although the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service does not record whether live turtles exported from the United States wind up in Chinese food markets or the foreign pet trade, the agency's statistics show alarming trends. One dealer is reported to have shipped 5,000 softshells out of Florida weekly in the summer of 1998.