This week I swapped my hiking boots for waders and set out to find spotted turtles in the swamps of Camp Edwards. This is the very first-time spotted turtles have been sampled in the Wildlife Epi Lab! John, a conservation biologist working under the Department of Defense Legacy Grant
and graduate student at Antioch University, led the quest for turtles this week. These turtles do not have radio transmitters like the box turtles from last week, so Promar traps were used to collect them. These netted traps have a zipper pouch for bait (we used sardines, or “deens” as they are affectionally called by the field techs) and openings on each side that taper down towards the middle. Turtles, and the occasional frog, swim in through the openings and down to eat the bait where they get caught in the middle of the trap.
We set 20 traps in two different sites at the beginning of the week and checked them every day. Many of the traps where not successful in getting turtles, but every day there were a few that were lucrative in their turtle trapping. John would get the info he needed from each turtle and then pass them along to me to do a physical exam, draw blood, and get swab samples. If we caught a female turtle that was gravid (carrying eggs), he would also secure a spool of fishing line to the carapace with electrical tape. The free end was secured to a tree, and the turtle was free to swim around to look for a nest. The next day, we would follow the line to track
the movements she made in hopes to find the nest, and at the end of the week, we removed the spool and tape.
Much to our surprise, we also found a few box turtles near the bogs! We were able to fit them all with transmitters so we can continue to monitor their health, and I was able to get some samples from them as well before we drove back to the office. Our ride for the week was a fabulous Polaris Ranger which allowed us to navigate the bumpy dirt roads in style. During our daily voyage to the study sites, we joked about how the turtle research we’re doing on base should be turned into an action-adventure screenplay…but that’s a post for a different blog.
Total Turtle Count: 42
