Meeting Abstract
Snapping turtle soup is a historic dish that remains a menu item in restaurants and taverns in the Philadelphia area. Unfortunately, heavy metals such as iron, lead, mercury and zinc are common in the aquatic environments where these turtles live, and these metals accumulate in turtle tissues through the food web. Though heavy metals negatively affect their reproduction and recruitment, snapping turtles can survive in polluted environments. We examined snapping turtle meat as a food source due to its high potential to transfer acquired heavy metals to the humans that consume it. Samples of snapper soup were acquired from restaurants throughout the lower Delaware River watershed in Pennsylvania (n=40). Meat, fish, and poultry typically contain a level of zinc around 29 ppm, while in vegetables it can be up to 2 ppm. Initial chemical analysis shows that several turtle meat samples contain a level of zinc greater than these values, and greater than the recommended daily intake value (8 mg per day or 0.11 mg/kg for females and 11 mg per day or 0.14 mg/kg for males). The zinc levels in the samples are not high enough to cause toxicity independently, but combined with other zinc-containing foods consumed in the daily diet, turtle meat can contribute to greater overall zinc levels in the body. High zinc content can cause harmful physiological effects. While our other heavy metal analyses are ongoing, snappers may contain nearly all toxic metals– for which there are no safe levels of consumption. This, combined with ecological data showing that continued harvests of turtle populations for consumption is unsustainable, suggests that snapper soup may be detrimental to both humans and turtles.
