Tag: research

SAFE Western Pond Turtle Video

- Wendy St. John 2 Comments

I might be biased, but this is a fantastic video about western pond turtles . . . the segment starting at 5:00 features the field site where I did my thesis research. The fellow being interviewed is my advisor, Nick Geist. And that’s your’s truly measuring the turtles in preparation to release them back into the lake. SO FAMOUS! 🙂

These Crazy Cute Turtles Want their Lake Back

- Wendy St. John 2 Comments

Hey, these are MY turtles! (Well, not just mine, but these are Geist Lab turtles. So I guess I could call them OUR turtles).

“Boxed in by a freeway, a golf course and a neighborhood, it’s a miracle that San Francisco’s Mountain Lake even exists. But not only is the tiny lake—located on the south end of the city’s Presidio park—still there, it now provides one of the few places in San Francisco where visitors can watch California’s only native aquatic turtle bask in the sun.”

Read the rest of the article here: http://ww2.kqed.org/science/2016/01/26/these-crazy-cute-baby-turtles-want-their-lake-back/

Western Pond Turtle Links

- Wendy St. John Leave a comment

Here is a collection of links to articles I’ve written about western pond turtles.

This “Western Pond Turtle” category menu also includes a variety of content published by other people, most of which involves turtles from my lab. Just continue scrolling down through this category page to see articles, images, and videos I’ve shared from other sources.

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Spatial Analysis in Macroecology

- Wendy St. John Leave a comment

It’s my turn to teach a lesson next week for the stats class I’m taking this semester (everyone has to do one; my topic is analyzing spatial data). This class was supposed to focus on SAS, but so far we’ve done almost nothing in SAS (which is fine with me since I don’t really care that much about learning SAS at this moment; I think JMP will be fine for most of my thesis needs). Especially since it looks like next week I might not do anything with SAS at all; instead, my professor wants me to play around with a program called SAM (Spatial Analysis in Macroecology), so I did a bit of that this evening.

And so far it looks pretty cool! I think I might be able to do some of the things I planned to do in ArcGIS in SAM instead, and a bit more easily. We shall see. It took me all evening to import a data set (for a really stupid reason I should have caught a lot sooner, but OH WELL :D. I thought it was a Mac to PC problem, and part of it was, but mostly it was that I had a numeric value in one of my column labels and apparently the program hates that).

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ANYHOODLE there they are. Those are ALL the nests we’ve found for this particular population of turtles in six years of field research. (Including viable nests, nest attempts, and predated nests). This isn’t the data set I’ll use for the meat of my analysis; I’m just going to use these to calculate a mean nest distance value for this population. But this was a good place to start with SAM, I think. Tomorrow, I’ll play around with this a bit more and see what cool stuff I can do. For now though, I like it. And I guess I can put together some sort of presentation about it, assuming this is what my professor decides he wants me to teach. Even if he ends up having me do stuff in JMP (or even SAS), it’s okay – I’m glad to be having the opportunity to learn a bit about SAM. I think it might be really useful to me down the road.

Baby Turtles

- Wendy St. John 2 Comments

These are western pond turtles (Emys marmorata), California’s only native freshwater turtle. They are also tiny and adorable right after they hatch (yes I am a scientist I have data to prove this). 😀 These babies were incubated in their nests (at my field site), and the eggs were collected last week, so they could hatch in the lab. They’ll be raised for either one or two years at one of three local zoos, before being released back into the wild.

Western pond turtle. That protrusion on the belly is the turtle’s external yolk; this is normal, and will be absorbed into its body during the next few weeks.
I AM SCIENTIST therefore I record data on paper towels. What, doesn’t everyone do this?
Literally just hatched.
Our incubators. Reasonably low tech, but they get the job done. OH LOOK more paper towels.
Precious babby. They are so tiny when they first hatch. I’d say on average they’re about 4 to 4.5 grams. This one is not even 4 grams (although the one in the first photo was big – almost 6).