this is true and i forgot about that. yeah I was going to warn him about the heads but hes caught a few so i figured he'd seen it himself by now. i thought everyone used a hooked pole to have them bite on to pull their heads out then chop it off. not an actual person. we'd seem em close to 200 lbs rather often. its insane how big and nasty they are. then you eat them.
Yes. I noticed they looked small in the pic. They're about 10 pounds. I had a smaller one a friend found crossing a road and dropped off. I started to take a pic of all three for comparison but figured no one really gave a shyt that much.
do you cut the bottom shell off to clean them? as an aside, we once caught a big ole alligator snapper that was full of eggs. we took them and put them all in big pickle jars with leaves and dirt, etc, then stuck em in dark storage in the shed. must have been about 50 or so. forgot all about them but heard something and they were in the process of hatching. was pretty cool. I was shocked. i figured they would just dry out. we let them all go. but they are some bad asses right out the gate. i think most if not all of them hatched.
When we would clean a turtle with eggs we would incubate and hatch the eggs as well. We would place a mark on each egg to distinguish what would be the top. You can't roll over turtle eggs or it will kill the embryo. We would place them on paper towels in large pyrex dishes, and spray the paper towels with water several times a day to keep them moist. We hatched hundreds of eggs over the years. We had a 3000 gallon pond in the back yard and we would keep them in there until they were about 6 inches long then we would release them into the wild.
Or maybe what we did was overkill. Over the years we hatched snapper, alligator snapper, red ear, yellow belly, chicken turtle, painted turtle, stink pot, softshell and box turtle eggs. Some were extracted rom turtles we cleaned, some were laid by the turtles in our pond, and some were from nests we found in the wild.
