Congratulations, Dr. Emily Basile!

As you can probably guess from the title of this post, Emily Basile received her Ph.D. today! At 1PM this afternoon, she presented her dissertation, "Persistent Organic Pollutants in Diamondback Terrapin Tissues, Eggs, and Sediments in Barnegat Bay, New Jersey", to the public. Around 2PM, Emily defended her dissertation to her committee. Then at 3PM, Dr. Emily joined the Avery lab, the ecology lab, and the Department of Biology at a party in her honor.

Next week, John Wnek will be defending his dissertation and hopefully earning the title of "Dr.". Don't worry ... I'll keep you updated on his progress!

In other news, Jules, Abby, and I are all in the process of getting ready for field season. Jules has been keeping herself busy trying to determine how she can walk two different beaches for eight hours a day watching for nesting terrapins (hmm ... sounds like she may need some help from Earthwatch volunteers). Abby just got a spectrophotometer so that she can analyze the different color wavelengths of the terrapins for her morphology study this summer. And I have my fingers crossed that this will be my last field season. I still need to expose a whole bunch of terrapins (53 to be exact) to boat engine sounds and I need to make some ambient sound recordings in the bay.

We're going to start unpacking the camp on June 7 and then the first Earthwatch team will join us on June 13. Bring it on, field season ... we're ready to catch some terrapins!

Jules Winters, PhD Candidate

When a student is working towards a PhD, there's one moment that tends to evoke more fear than any other ... the candidacy exam. The candidacy exam at Drexel consists of two parts: a week long written exam and a 3-4 hour oral exam. During the oral exam, the student needs to defend the answers to their written exam and also present/defend their dissertation proposal. Typically, a PhD student attempts to complete their candidacy exam at the end of their second year of study. In exciting news, Jules just passed her candidacy exam on May 5. Since it was also Cinco de Mayo, a bunch of us ecology nerds went out to celebrate Jules' achievement following her exam.

From left to right: Pat (frogs in Bioko Island), Samir (loggerhead sea turtles in Greece), Jen (Samir's fiancee), Jules (PhD Candidate extraordinaire), Me, Steve (freshwater turtles in southeastern PA), Maggie (red colobus in Bioko Island), and Jack (loggerhead sea turtles in Greece).

As far as what this means for the terrapin project in Barnegat Bay, this summer Jules will start collecting "real" data, i.e., the data that she will eventually use to write her dissertation. My understanding is that she'll be looking at terrapin nesting in response to anthropogenic (human-caused) changes in the bay such as bulkheading.

Gulf Coast Oil Spill Threatens Terrapins

By now, everyone has probably heard about the oil spill that occurred off the coast of Louisiana on April 20, 2010. My understanding is that there was an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig which resulted in a massive oil spill. Yesterday, the estimate was that the spill covers a surface area of more than 2,500 square miles. Oil is leaking from the oil well at the rate of 5 to 25 thousand barrels per day. By April 30, the oil had already begun to appear at wildlife refuges on Louisiana's coast. Many species are at risk including shrimp, fish, marine mammals, shore birds, and unfortunately ... even terrapins.

For more information on the oil spill and gulf coast terrapins, check out this link!

Oil Spill Threatens Terrapins

Congratulations Dr. Claire!!!

I'm proud to announce that Claire Sheridan (Coleman) successfully defended her dissertation on April 8, 2010. Congrats, Dr. Claire! Since Dr. Avery's graduate students are rarely all in the same location at the same time, we took the opportunity to pose for a lab photo (From left: John, Abby, Steven, Me, Emily, Jules, Dr. Claire, and Dr. Avery).

Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head!

The Lighthouse Center in Waretown, NJ has recently been hit with several substantial rainstorms. During the most recent storm, there was quite a bit of flooding and a tree actually toppled over on to the roof of the dining hall! The fearless groundskeeper, Pola Galie, snapped a few pictures of the damage. Although our summer home may not be in perfect condition right now, I have no doubt we will be back in business by mid-June and completely ready for our first Earthwatch team!

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!