Does a turtle by any other name smell so... sweet?

What a productive week we've had at Terrapin Station! Team 5 has really shown us their stuff, and we're very sorry to see them go today:(

This group has been able to apply their turtle knowledge to lots of other species in the herpetology field:

To begin, before the team even had a chance to capture a terrapin, they caught a box turtle without even trying last Monday! A female box turtle had walked into one of our crab pots - on land! Another experience came when one volunteer chose to bushwhack through Warren Grove with Co-PI, Dr. Walt Bien. Sure enough, when you're with Walt you're in for some serious herping! Volunteer Amanda was in it to help with their Lepidoptera research, but sure enough they came across a timber rattle snake in the process! She had lots of stories about holding the snake with tongs while it was threateningly rattleing at her!

To continue the herpetology adventure this week, Dr. Jim Spotila lead the volunteers through a box turtle next excavation! The box turtle was observed nesting on June 8 when Jim and other leading sea turtle researchers were at the field station for a conference. As you can see in the picture, the volunteers really enjoyed 'candle-lighting' the eggs to look for signs of the baby box turtles.

Last but not least, our volunteers were very surprised to find an incredibly large, 30 lb terrapin in a fyke net yesterday. Wait, that doesn't sound right... it was a SNAPPING TURTLE!!!! Normally, snappers and terrapins don't share habitats, snapping turtles being fresh water inhabitants, and terrapins prefering brackish water. For this reason, we've never caught a snapping turtle in one of our traps in Forsythe National Refuge before. This large male was not happy to be in the trap, and it was almost impossible to get him out without someone having the guts to put their hands in the net at the risk of losing some fingers... Luckily, fellow Avery lab graduate student, Steven Pearson, was in town for the day and being a fresh water turtle ecologist he was more than happy to pull the turtle out of the trap for us. A few claw scratches later, Steve had the snapper contained on the marshland for us to observe. In the picture you'll see Lori holding our proud capture - she'll voutch that it was one heavy turtle!

Don't worry - we're not switching our study species anytime soon! This week we had lots of terrapins in the lab for our volunteers to work with too. Would you believe that we caught 53 terrapins this week?! Woo-hoo!