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STAR LEDGER (Newark, New Jersey) 06 August 06 The tortoise and the scare: An unlikely tale of survival (Judy Peet)
Turtle No.366 never had a chance, but she does have a legacy.
An hour after her car-mangled corpse was found on the causeway connecting the Garden State Parkway with the Shore town of Avalon, a biologist at the Wetlands Institute carefully sliced the turtle open and pulled out five undamaged eggs.
It was a gruesome act of mercy, but about the only hope for the diamondback terrapins of South Jersey.
Saltwater terrapins have a range about two miles wide, stretching for 3,300 miles along the coast from Cape Cod to Texas. The only turtle species found exclusively in brackish marshes, the gentle reptiles are fighting an uphill survival battle against loss of habitat everywhere.
But only in New Jersey are there "crazy people picking up dead turtles off the road," according to Roger Wood, a Richard Stockton College professor who began the award-winning roadkill project 17 years ago.
"Down here in South Jersey are the most dangerous turtle crossings in the entire U.S.," Wood said. "Our only hope for the turtles is to slow down the rate they are getting slammed by humans."
Once hunted to near extinction for food, the terrapins are now endangered by development, cars, loss of nesting sites, new predators, boating traffic and commercial crab traps.
Wood was searching for a way to help the turtles in 1989 when he came across a smashed turtle and noticed some of her eggs were still viable. He saved and incubated the eggs. It was the beginning of what has become the diamondback recovery program at the state-funded Wetlands Institute in Stone Harbor, where he is research director.
It starts with the roadkill -- 366 scraped off the roads of Avalon, Stone Harbor and Sea Isle City this season alone.
From those corpses, 600 eggs were harvested, from which about 240 turtles are expected to survive. Once out of the shell, the baby turtles are farmed out to a number of volunteer human parents, including students at Richard Stockton College, two South Jersey public schools and children in a conservation program at the Philadelphia Zoo.
Turtle No.366's last act -- giving up her eggs -- was witnessed by 21 children who had raised terrapins from the Wetlands Institute as a camp project at the Philadelphia Zoo. They came to the institute with 12 hand-raised turtles, now large enough to release in the wild.
The children stood in the lab, green-faced, as No.366, a fully grown female about the size of a dinner plate, was carefully dissected by one of the institute's 10 interns. These student biologists come from as far as India and China to participate in the unique roadkill project.
The turtle eggs were removed, gently washed and placed in an incubator. The children were encouraged to touch the eggs, which were surprisingly soft, not at all like chicken eggs.
Along one wall of the lab were boxes containing 4-inch, year-old turtles -- raised at the zoo and slated to be released back into the marsh later in the day. The turtles spend a year in captivity before release because Wood found the larger the turtle, the better the chance of survival. Newborns become snack food for seagulls.
In a nearby tank, quarter-size new hatchlings struggled out of their eggs, making a scratchy sound that accompanied Wood as he explained why he has dedicated a quarter of his life to helping diamondback terrapins.
Once they numbered in the millions, providing a vital link in the tidal wetlands ecology.
The Native Americans revered them. The word terrapin comes from the Algonquin word torope, for saltwater turtles. The Victorians adored them, unfortunately as turtle soup.
By the turn of the last century, diamondback terrapins were slaughtered by the hundreds of thousands.
The two things that saved them were scarcity and Prohibition. Apparently, turtle soup isn't worth the bowl it's served in without sherry.
"When I was a child at the Jersey Shore in the 1940s, I never saw a turtle," Wood recalled. "Neither had my father before me.
"They are wonderful little creatures who try so hard to survive," he said. "Who wouldn't want to help them?"
Left on their own, the little reptiles began to resurface in New Jersey the 1960s, Wood said. By that time, they faced a whole new set of problems.
With the Garden State Parkway came big-time Shore development. Although diamondbacks around Barnegat Bay found protected marshes to spawn, away from human impact, the South Jersey habitats were all right in the path of development, Wood said.
Developers built bridges that were used not only by cars, but by diamondback predators like raccoons and skunks, who were not native to the barrier islands.
Dunes where the turtles made their shallow nests were leveled to make way for more houses. It became impossible for the turtles to get to a nest without crossing a road.
Although diamondbacks, so-called because of the distinctive diamond-shaped markings on their shells, lay eggs up to three times a season, they lay only four to 18 eggs at a time.
With each nesting, the females come out of the water, looking for dunes they have used in the past. Almost all the nesting sites are separated from the marsh by roads that the turtles slowly cross. They lay their eggs, cover them and cross the road again to go back to the marsh.
The means as many as six road crossings per turtle per season. On Stone Harbor Boulevard alone, cars come by at a rate of one every three seconds during the day, Wood said.
Institute research coordinator Eileen Eberly said no one knows how many turtles try to cross the road during nesting season every May through July because no one knows how many terrapins there are.
"On a single day in June, we picked up 30 roadkill turtles," said Eberly, adding that staff members take turns patrolling 38 miles of prime terrapin crossing roads during the height of the nesting season. They patrol five times a day. In addition to the 366 dead turtles found, the patrols have rescued 190 unharmed turtles since May.
What is most depressing, the biologists said, is that the number of turtles coming out of the marsh to nest has been steadily declining for the past five years. No one is sure why.
"At least we've raised consciousness around here," Eberly said, pointing to a homemade sign near a beach house driveway. Picturing a turtle, it said: "Help me cross the road."
Only female diamondback terrapins leave the marsh. The males stay in the brackish water their entire lives, which are estimated to be at least 40 years. That is, if they don't get caught in crab traps.
Crab traps were considered the leading cause of death for the male diamondback terrapins -- who drown if they can't come up for air -- until Wood developed a turtle barrier that the state now requires placed on all crab traps.
Eberly said it "is depressing to see the number of turtles declining, but as biologists, all we can do is try our best until a better solution comes along."
The afternoon of No.366's death, the Philadelphia children, age 11 to 13, headed to a local marsh to release the dozen yearlings.
One by one, the turtles were gently laid at the water's edge.
"You've been a very nice turtle, and I'm glad to have met you," said Allison Starr, 11, to the female turtle she named Billy Bob.
"Into the wild and beyond," announced Lucas O'Connor, 11, as he released his turtle. He shouted encouragement as his turtle swam straight for a fiddler crab, dinner in the marsh. The crab easily evaded capture.
"I wonder if they're going make it in the wild," Lucas said. "Here the food moves."
The tortoise and the scare: An unlikely tale of survival

Great article! Thanks for sharing!