Monday, August 17, 2009

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!

Friday, August 14, 2009

Have you seen the environmental data loggers???


We're currently in the middle of Team 5 and it's been an EXTREMELY busy week. Dr. Avery is out of town for vacation and thus Dr. Jim Spotila has been our fearless leader (although he's been spending most of his time writing his new book, "Saving Sea Turtles"). We started the week out with a broken boat, a broken trailer, and a broken freezer. Shortly thereafter, we found that most of our environmental sensors that were placed throughout the bay had gone missing (i.e., they were stolen). Although initially upsetting, Jules, Abby, Andy, and Brianna were quick to volunteer to help me build a new floating board to hold more sensors. In the photo above, you can see Andy, Abby, and Brianna busily working on the new board (with my brand new drill that Jim bought me!). A temperature/light sensor will be placed on one side of the board and then two ibuttons will be suspended from the board into the water column to collect water temperature data. The sensors are programmed to collect one data point every 15 minutes so we should be back in action soon.

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Bye Team 4!!!



Team 4 (aka Teen Team 2, check out the pic on the right!) left us last Monday after a great nine days together. Turtle trapping was a bit low. On the best day, we caught 17 turtles and on the worst day ... 0. Unfortunately, the off week hasn't been any better. I'm pretty sure that we haven't broken the 10 turtle mark since the volunteers left. Plus it's been a rainy week. We didn't even get out on the water for one day due to thunderstorms.

Team 5 arrived yesterday. We now have eight volunteers who range in age from 18 to 54. They have traveled from as close as northern NJ to as far as Australia. We pulled all of the traps out of the water over the weekend and the new volunteers are currently placing traps in Collins Pond and Cable Creek. Here's hoping we catch lots of turtles!