I agree with Biodiversivist.  I think that properly raised catfish and other fish in fresh water is a better choice for the environment than are ocean fish.  Those of us in LA have long held a bais against fish that may have been caught in Santa Monica bay.  This is one of the reason we support Heal the Bay.

How about urban fisheries?  It would seem it would be appropriate to develop within the urban environment fisheries that combine public space with fisheries that can provide humans a place to enjoy a park like setting with active water and water life, maybe even allowing fishing for a fee, while raising fresh water fish. A series of waterfalls, circulating water, and fish farming may work very well into a park theme.

I was back home in South Dakota this last week working on a wind farm project.  Dad and I pulled out a few bass out of the stock pond we built when I was 12 years old.  I am almost 55 and Dad is 76 for those who want to do the math.  We do not let our cattle drink directly out of the pond, but it is the source of water that we provide them.  It has been a dry year, less than 6 inches this year, but there are sufficient stores from past years to provide water for the herd as well as the fish.  The turtles have gotten well out of hand, they ate two cats this last year.  I am a little un-settled about that.  It makes me a supporter of turtle soup, where I was not before.  We are getting a lot of turtles back home.

I wonder how much fish we could provide a community from a  significant water feature in a park or even associated with a local municipal power plant or other municipal water use.  Depth is an important feature.  I think this is worthy of consideration.

See, this is what I have been saying.  Once we get farmable carnivorous fish to accept an arthropod-based diet, and we have a great promising direction.

Of course, these guys are still thinking about krill, which are these delicate copepods, etc.

My sentiment is, if salmon like krill, they will love Torta de cucaracha tosta alla Sardagnesa.

As I see it, this is the way of the future.  We must make an effort, to proceed in a course of experiments, so that farmable ocean fish, including salmon and cod, may find a specialized insect-based diet desirable and satisfactory.

Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!

The same way they catch other food.  Lie still, something comes up to them just to see what is going on, whem the victim gets too close they lock their jaws onto to the victim and then don't let go.

We never stocked the pond.  I understand that water fowl can carry the eggs.

FFletcher never actually answered your question, Biodiv, about whether he/she was talking about snapping turtles, or some other kind.

Also, we are left in the dark by the puzzling suggestion, "Water fowl can carry the eggs."  Whose eggs?  And how do they carry them?

Turtles are wonderful, very ancient creatures, with very uncertain systematics.  Class Reptilia, as it is, is a pretty odd grab bag.  It is not easy at all to establish a connexion between the anapsid turtles, on the one hand, and the diapsid lizards and snakes on the other.  Of course, snakes are just fancy-schmancy, curiously detailed lizards.  And then, the late Steve Irwin's pals, the crocodilians, those lovable diapsid archosaurs, are more closely related to pigeons and flamingos and hummingbirds -- and the celebrated toothy Saurischians Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptor mongoliensis, but also Apatosaurus louisae, and even such Ornithischians as Protoceratops andrewsi and Maiasaura peeblesorum -- than they are to lizards and snakes.

And then there is the tuatara.  Alas, the poor Rhynchocephalians!  Once so glorious, how they have come down in the world!  They are sort of like the Armenians, actually: They have been through a lot, and they are not unimportant, but the only people who tend to think about them are other Armenians.  And politicians with considerable Armenian constituencies.

Possibly, there is some connexion between turtles and another very mysterious reptilian lineage, the plesiosaurs.  But that direction, pursued by a number of workers without clear success, finally does not look all that promising.

Anyway, not that I have anything against cats personally, but the subject of How To Kill a Cat has come up in more than one thread, and it strikes me that it would be interesting to know more about FFletcher's turtles' technique.  "Locking jaws and not letting go" sounds fine for starters.  But cats can fight back, no?  What are those claws and teeth and surly dispositions for, anyhow, adaptively speaking?

It seems clear that what the turtles need to do is gang up on the cat, or pull the cat under water, or some combination of such tactics.

What part of the cat do they glom onto, in the first place?

In the Turtles segment of the four-part documentary series on the Reptiles, shown on Nature, recently re-aired, there is a fascinating scene showing turtles -- definitely not snapping turtles, but something else -- nabbing doves that came down to the water to drink.

And there is a wonderful scene in which a loggerhead turtle turns around to confront a shark that was pursuing it, and bites it on the flank, and drives it away.  You go, little turtle!

Anyway, regarding FFletcher's turtles, and ex-cats, it would not surprise me at all if the local birds formed a pact with the turtles, requesting them to rid the neighborhood of their Ancient Enemy.  What leverage the birds have over the turtles, or what benefit the turtles derive from this arrangement, other than cat for lunch, of course I cannot say.  But all the same, there is a clear moral here: Cats should not be allowed out of the house!  For their own good, and for the good of the birds!

I have never had turtle soup.  In the interest of science, I would not mind tasting it; but personally, morally, I would rather pass.  There is however a spectacular turtle soup, part of the climax actually, in my heroine Isak Dinesen's wonderful story "Babette's Feast," which was made into a delightful movie.

Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!

We have several stock ponds on the ranch.  Each of them have different kind of fish, but we never stocked them.  They just get fish.  Several years ago, when I was a child, I asked the State College how these stock ponds get fish and they explained that it appears that fertilized fish eggs attach to ducks as they swim and then are deposited in other waters when the bird travels.

I believe they are box turtles.  They generally eat insects.  But some get very large, like 15 inches across.  They are strong.  They attack by laying near the water, drawing in their head and legs until something comes by, and then they strike, biting on to whatever they can and then not letting go.  I would never let them kill a cat, but I have had to force them to let go of cats, and once a little dog, a number of times.  This one cat we once had had half of her front paw biten off.

I have had turtle soup in New Orleans.  Only had it once, probably will not have it again.

Or rather, heurekas moi, you have found it for me, dear FFletcher!

I have always been amazed at how fish have come to populate bodies of water that seem either inaccessibly inland or inaccessibly far upstream.  I had never heard about fertilized eggs adhering to the bodies of water fowl!  That is wonderful!  I am in your debt.

Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!

Cute picture, Biodiv.  But surely FFletcher would recognize a snapping turtle when he sees one?  Their long tails and their heads are quite distinctive.  Still, it is not impossible.  And I agree, "box turtle" cannot be right.

And if it is snapping turtles that FFletcher has, unless he lives pretty far South, around the lower Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio, they are certainly common snapping turtles.

And so is that darling baby in your photo, I think, since it looks more like the pictures of adult common snapping turtles that I have than like those of alligator snapping turtles.

Basking turtles are possibly what FF has, or map turtles.  But neither kind usually gets quite as big as FF reports.

As to whether a fifteen-inch-long turtle might have the cojones to go for an adult mammal at least as large as itself, I would not know.  But it sounds consistent with what is said about snapping-turtlish aggression.  So let us go with the common snapping turtle suggestion, provisionally, unless FF can give a better ID.

Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!

Has anyone heard anything on net cutters dropped in crucial areas of these ecosystems?  It would seem to be the only practical solution.

Properly shaped cutting tools that sit on the bottom and cut the nets as they slide across the bottom.  Or maybe that float off the bottom on anchors to catch nets that don't drag across the ocean floor.

What would be the legality of organizations like greenpeace deploying these devices?  Given the push for corporate ownership of all resources on planet earth it would seem to be the only practical way to save ocean life.

Monkey wrench these corpoRATS!

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