It's photo dump week! For this week's post, I decided to comb through my photo album of wayyy too many field pictures and share some of my favorites. This week, we were trapping and caught Blanding’s, painted, and snapping turtles. I loved seeing this juvenile snapper in a trap. As part of our physical [...]
Welcome to Find Your Perfect Shellmate, the newest way to find your match online! Be sure to browse through the 14 eligible bachelors and bachelorettes we are featuring today! Who knows? Keep an open mind and maybe you’ll find your soulmate down below! Please share with the lonely turtles in your life! We [...]
Every year, turtles go through a process called nesting season. This is when they come to land to nest, aka dig their holes and lay their eggs, and then go back to the water to live their lives. While this is a very natural event, sometimes they go to more unnatural places. Even though we [...]
Hey, everyone! This week we wanted to talk about some turtles that are right across the veterinary medicine campus at The Arboretum! This summer, we have been helping an international graduate student on her Master’s project. She’s been trapping turtles in the pond and we’ve been going out to help her work them up, [...]
We are proud to present to you the collaboration of the generation as we compare our shelly sidekicks to SpongeBob's notorious crew! Blanding's Turtles are the main character of the show aka SpongeBob. Not only do most of the Wildlife Epidemiology Lab’s projects surround the health of blanding's turtles, they also have bright [...]
This week Lake County had some quieter days trapping turtles on our field sites. However, we caught some of the most lovable turtles in our traps. Check out this juvenile Common snapping turtle and the Painted turtle twins. [...]
We were excited to have some friends visit us this week! Maddy, the Walder Turtle vet student, joined us in Lake County to help us trap and track. We have ten telemetered turtles at one of our sites, and we sample them each once a month. This helps us see how their bloodwork changes over [...]
Welcome back! Today we wanted to talk about how we use radio telemetry to track ornate box turtles, as this year we have been and will continue to track 50 turtles over the active season! When we head into the field for the first time during the field season, we bring the turtle dogs with [...]
Our tackle boxes Contains Small and large plasma tubes Extra 2ml eppendorf tubes Extra Lithium heparin (anticoagulant) tubes A handful of syringes A scale Each of us has a scale type: 1 large hanging scale used to weigh our big turtles (>5kg) (softshells & snappers) 1 small tabletop scale Extra syringes already prepped with needles [...]
What a week! We’ve examined many turtle friends, and the summer is really taking off. This past week Marg and I were back together on my favorite field site. It was such a delight seeing the various ponds and all the prairie plants blooming and growing. Outside of turtles, I also loved stumbling upon frogs, [...]
