Can young turtles make a big change?
By LAURA MOYER
Fredricksburg FreeLance Star

CHARLES CITY--Nic Frederick found the first box turtle about where he'd
expected, eating a mushroom next to a hollowed-out tree. The second nestled in
some wet brown oak leaves, a blood-gorged mosquito on its tail.

The next seven turtles were roughly where Frederick expected them to be, hanging
out at swamp edges or hiding in tall grass, having moved only a few yards from
where Frederick had tracked them the day before.

But the last turtle, No. 204, was a traveler.

Since its release from captivity a couple of weeks before--along with the other
nine--this rambling turtle had crossed a road and crawled hundreds of feet along
a mostly flat section of forest.

Frederick tracked it as he had the others, using an antenna that picked up
signals from a transmitter affixed to the turtle's shell.

Frederick, a 25-year-old Virginia Commonwealth University biology grad student,
has been studying Eastern box turtles for the past year and a half at VCU's Rice
center, a 340-acre woodland preserve along the James River about 25 miles east
of Richmond.

The creatures are appealing, with helmet-shaped carapaces and mellow demeanors
that place them among Virginia's most beloved reptiles.

But they're are also in trouble. And Frederick wants to help.

Eastern box turtles, Terrapene carolina carolina, can live to about the same age
as people, but they're slow to reach sexual maturity. And when they do
reproduce, it's often only one clutch of three or four eggs per year. Juvenile
turtles are highly susceptible to predators, and only a small fraction survive
to adulthood.

"If a population like this gets hit by anything," Frederick said, "it's hard to
bounce back."

What's hit box turtles is us.

Development has destroyed much turtle habitat and fragmented even more. The
simple act of constructing subdivision roads cuts the turtles' breeding
territory into tiny wooded islands.

Crossing those roads is more than risky. And yet the turtles try, with
predictable results.

In addition, box turtles are popular pets, and they're often plucked from the
wild by people who think the removal of just one can't hurt. It can, and it
does.

Virginia's box turtle population has been in decline for at least 30 years,
Frederick said. They're just not able to reproduce as fast as they're being
lost. And in some places scientists have identified "ghost populations,"
concentrations of mature resident turtles, but almost no juveniles.

Efforts to help out by physically transplanting breeding-age box turtles have
been disappointing. Like people, the turtles know where home is, and that's
where they want to be.

Rather than adapt to a strange location, turtles will simply head back to where
they hatched. Their journeys are so purposeful they may not even stop to eat
along the way.

That's where Frederick's research project comes in. Is it possible to move
turtles still too young to breed, before a particular territory has become
imprinted on them as home?

He's studying two groups of turtles that have spent their early lives in
captivity. (They are the descendants of 35 adult turtles rescued some years ago
from a construction site.)

Those captive-reared turtles are being introduced at the Rice Center, in Charles
City County, with the hope that they will thrive there and add their genes to a
known resident population.

Frederick tracks his study turtles several times a week and plots their
locations using a GPS.

One cool, cloudy summer day he walked through the woods with helpers Kevin
Gallagher, 27, who's doing an independent field study for an undergrad class,
and Joey Thompson, a 17-year-old St. Christopher's School intern.

Over 2 hours, they tramped up and down ravines, through mud and over logs to
track the turtles. Once they found them, they simply noted their positions and
moved on--without unnecessarily handling the animals or disturbing their
immediate surroundings.

So far, Frederick said, the turtles seem to be doing well. "There are raccoons
out here, and one of these guys has been gnawed on," he noted. But there's been
little study-turtle mortality.

And along the way, Frederick said, he's come across 41 resident box turtles.
They're not part of his study, but he does weigh them and measure the height,
length and width of their carapaces, or upper shells, and plastrons, the flat
underparts.

He provides that data to the nearby office of the Virginia Department of Game
and Inland Fisheries, which also runs box turtle studies and education programs
at the Rice Center.

Box turtles, Frederick said, are important to the cycle of life in the woods.
They eat anything and everything--worms, insects, fruits, berries, carrion and
fungi. They're believed to be important in dispersing fungi spores.

"They play more of a role than just being cute in the forest," Frederick said.

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