We say 'hey!' to a frozen Barnegat Bay

As we turned the corner on Bayshore Drive last Thursday, my ears began to ring after hearing Lori say: "Are those birds STANDING on the water?" Sure enough, a 1.5 hour drive, 45 min of packing, and 5 min of trailering the Lowe boat after leaving Drexel, Claire, Lori and I had arrived at the boat dock greeted by a frozen Barnegat Bay.

The intended mission? We journeyed to B-gat for a data download from my underwater sonic receivers which are currently logging movement data from three overwintering terrapins in Arnold's Pond. It's important to check these receivers to ensure that they are not damaged from the weather or boating activity, and also so the memory is not overloaded (they can hold up to 100,000 data points)!

While upset that our initial quest would have to be postponed, the three of us were still excited to see the bay in this condition. As ecologists, it is fascinating to observe our focus ecosystem in such a dynamic state from that which we are used to experiencing in June! We stayed for a bit at the dock to measure temperature and salinity at various depths with the YSI (below). The temperatures ranged from 1.2C at the surface to 0.7C about half a meter deep! Also, it was convenient that we had the stick pole (about 8ft long, used to stabilize the boat while downloading data normally) to poke at the ice from the dock, to see how thick it really was.

It seems like ice would be an obvious deterrent to our mission, and probably something we should have considered before venturing to Barnegat with a boat. However, my personal communication with locals varies in how 'normal' it is for the bay to freeze. Prior to leaving my receivers out over the winter, many people swore that the bay 'never' freezes. A local at the dock last week said that he didn't remember this ever happening, for instance. Since asking around more, I have heard from some locals that the bay always freezes at least in part, but never in entirety. This makes more sense, as you can see above, that not all of the bay was completely frozen...only where we needed to go with the boat, unfortunately.

Overall, returning to Barnegat in the winter turned into an incredibly informative venture for the three of us. Don't worry, the terrapins are fine - as reptiles, they can adjust very well to temperature changes! Next time, us humans will just have to check the weather first!

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!

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.

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!

A chop from the prop

Last week during trapping, the team at Terrapin Station noticed a startling pattern. Over three consecutive days, three large female terrapins were captured with major shell damage. All were caught in Gunning River, one of our southern-most sites. Here, we have witnessed jetskis and other personal watercrafts zip through the narrow channels on many occasions. We can't say that the number of speedsters is greater than in other BBay terrapin habitats, but this sampling of turtles may help suggest it to be so...

The first lady captured had the most severe injuries. Picture 1 above shows her severed front limbs, and major scarring on the plastron near these areas. She's lucky to be alive! The correlation of scarring and limb damage in the same areas is obvious prop damage, versus predation.
The second terrapin (not pictured) had a large puncture scar on her carapace. With the exception of a boat propeller, there is nothing strong, sharp, or fast enough to have caused such an injury in Barnegat Bay.
The third terrapin and her injuries can be seen in picture 2 and 3. The area of her carapace above her left forelimb was so completely cut that it was actually wiggling! As you can see in picture 3, she was quickly mended thanks to some fast drying epoxy (recommended for concrete, stone, wood, glass or metal).

It is important to post these pictures, not so that you feel sorry for the terrapins, but more so to promote awareness of the impact boating may cause the natural inhabitants of our waterways. Observations such as these are a harsh reminder of how important research like Lori and Andy's (involving the impacts of anthropogenic sound on terrapins) is to promoting responsible management of the areas shared by humans and turtles, alike.

We're now in the middle of Team 4! We have seven teens and one teen coordinator all here at the Lighthouse Center helping us out. Today, Hal and Lori P. are taking out groups of volunteers on the boats to do some turtle trapping. Andy and Rachel are out on the water doing the last of Andy's boat trials. Yay Andy! I was left behind to do some data analysis, but somehow it seemed like more fun to blog.

I also wanted to show everyone the article that appeared in the Buffalo News recently. Check it out for more info on Andy's study!

Asbury Park Press

Yesterday, we had a visit from a reporter and a photographer from the Asbury Park Press. They stopped by the Lighthouse Center early in the morning and Andy and I discussed our sound/boat research with them. After that, the reporters joined Hal and John for a short boat trip to the bay. They visited a fyke (surprise, surprise ... there was a turtle in it!) and then went over to John's study site. An article was in the newspaper today about the Earthwatch project (Click here to see the article!) and there will be another article in the near future on John's "Project Terrapin". Good article, fun experience, and always great to get info about the turtles out there ... but there are a few scientific inaccuracies in the text. Can you find any???

Photo album