Endangered
Black marsh turtle
Siebenrockiella crassicollis
Black marsh turtle (called black marsh turtle, smiling terrapin, and Siamese temple turtle, among others) is a freshwater turtle endemic to Southeast Asia.
Appearance
The ovoid carapace (the dorsal shell) is widest just behind the middle portion, with a strongly serrated posterior margin. The carapace is almost entirely black or dark brown with black radiating patterns. The plastron (the ventral shell) is not hinged and has a shallow U-shaped notch in the pair of anal scutes.
Adult black marsh turtles are usually small to medium-sized, averaging at around 17 cm (6.7 in) in length and rarely exceeding 20 cm (7.9 in).
Range and habitat
Black marsh turtles can be found in southern Vietnam, Cambodia, southern Myanmar (Tenasserim), central and peninsular Thailand, eastern and western Malaysia, Singapore, and the Indonesian islands of Java, Kalimantan, and Sumatra. A specimen discovered in the Cerucuk River on Belitung Island in May 2023 is the first official record of the species on the island and represents a significant range extension beyond previously recorded populations in Sumatra to the west and Borneo to the east. Black marsh turtle (called black marsh turtle, smiling terrapin, and Siamese temple turtle, among others) is a freshwater turtle endemic to Southeast Asia.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
Black marsh turtles are predominantly carnivorous and prefer to feed underwater. Mostly aquatic and nocturnal, they will sometimes come out to land at night to forage or mate, and occasionally during the day to bask.
In courtship, males will bob their heads up and down while chasing a female.
In crisis
Black marsh turtles are classified as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Despite these sanctions, the greatest threat to black marsh turtles, along with other Southeast Asian freshwater turtles, is the rising demand for turtles for the international meat trade, particularly for the Chinese food markets. Black marsh turtle populations in Cambodia and Vietnam are already considered endangered for this reason.
Thousands of individuals are often confiscated regularly in shipments. Official records in 1999 show that around 135,000 individuals were exported within the span of 10 months in Malaysia alone.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix II. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Black marsh turtle is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Black marsh turtle, Wikidata item Q2180636. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
