AKA The Best Week of the Summer When we thought spending our summer outside every day in the field finding turtles couldn’t get any better, it did. We participated in the annual turtle games -- BBV (Blanding’s Bowl V). The games have been occurring for five years and it is one week out of the [...]
Lauren Got Stuck in the Rain I wouldn’t say got stuck as much as I would say willingly chose to get out of the vehicle while it was raining, with a radio antennae in hand, to track turtles. Rain or shine, during nesting season it is important to know where our turtle friends are because [...]
Maurer Nested First The first turtle nested! She made a run for it, dug a hole and layed her eggs like a pro. She is a newly tracked turtle this year so we weren’t sure when or where to expect her to nest but she did so and it was all exciting! Until… the next [...]
Kirsten Writes a Note to Self You will also see a picture of me working at my lab bench with a taped note saying “Literally please wait 5 minutes OMG.” As you can imagine, lab work does not always run smoothly. I am spending a lot of lab time this summer doing DNA extractions, and it [...]
We Felt Eggs It is that time of season where female Blanding’s turtles are becoming gravid (carrying eggs). These turtles have delayed maturation, reaching sexual maturity between 14-20 years of age, which this one of the reasons for an unsustainable population. The amount of turtles that survive to this age, avoiding habitat destruction, road mortality, [...]
Two weeks in and we are already famous (and a little rich in terms of vet student status since we passed our first pay day). Well not really, but we did appear in the background of a few news stories featuring LCFPD’s Blanding’s turtle head-starting program. What we really care about getting famous is our state-endangered [...]
Welcome to our Blanding’s blog, where we are excited to share our summer turtle adventures with you! The school year just ended, the field season has officially started and we are more than thrilled to get our feet wet (literally and figuratively). As a part of Dr. Matt Allender’s Wildlife Epidemiology Lab, we as veterinary [...]
