Hello readers! Although we know you come here for cute turtle pics and stories about us sloshing through marshes, unfortunately we have none of that this week. Having packed up the field lab, we have returned to the Wildlife Epi Lab headquarters to do lots of very important science. This means no more daily overdose [...]
Katy is introducing our recaptured turtle Rose to trees. During the final week of turtle team's field season, we were joined by a few familiar faces! Fourth years Ivana, Brina and Katy joined us while fulfilling their professional development requirement for clinics. This week, we visited the same sites as we did in [...]
Welcome back to the blog! With field season slowly slipping away, Sam and I wanted to return the focus to the stars of summer: Blanding's turtles! This week's vlog is from the perspective of some of our favorite turtles. You will know when the Blanding's have taken over the camera when you see a [...]
Welcome back readers! Last week we packed up our lab and headed back to U of I to start lab work this week (which you'll hear more about in next week's blog). Don't fret though, as we will return to the field in August for one more week to recapture and resample all the headstarts. [...]
Throughout all of these posts, you may have been wondering what we do with the turtles after we catch them and hopefully this post answers all those questions! Once we catch the turtles in the field, we place them in pencil cases with a letter associated with their ID. These pencil cases are placed in [...]
Welcome back to the blog! So far Sam and I have casually mentioned that we set traps for Blanding's, but this week we wanted to show you the process. It was a perfect week to share with you since we had such good trap success! Every week we have the same schedule in different [...]
Ladies and gentlemen welcome to the the first Kane County Miniature Blanding's Bowl. Today our commentary will cover the exciting and cutthroat competition of turtle capturing. Last week Taylor, a member of our team, decided to make things a little more interesting and introduce a point system for our traps. The four of us that [...]
"Why do you do research on Blanding's?" "Can I have a Blanding's turtle as a pet?" "How can the everyday person be involved in wildlife epidemiology?" "Do you ever catch other animals in your traps?" "Why does the Blanding's have a yellow neck?" Thank you to everyone who submitted questions to us over the [...]
When we don't get to sample cute turtles, we get to catch up on things around the lab! During field weeks, we collect samples such as cloacal-oral swabs, blood and shell swabs which need to be extracted. These samples are used to test for pathogens and diseases that may affect these turtles. You may [...]
Welcome back to another exciting installment of Michelle and Alexis doing stuff! Reading our blog may make it seem like we are field research super cyborgs sent to Earth to save the Blanding's turtles, but in reality we are human and do things outside of the swamp and the lab. This week we'd like to [...]
