Tag: research
June 23
June 21st
Still at the field site. Just found out this morning that the Oakland Zoo’s turtle release is happening on Thursday, so we decided to just stay up here a couple of extra days, instead of driving back today and back again on Thursday. Plus, there should be plenty of turtle stuff to do. We found eleven turtles out of the water last night, which I think is the most any team has ever found in a single day. Pretty cool, especially since there were just three of us – me, Kristi, and my son, and he wasn’t working the whole time.
Tonight we have a big team, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we find even more. Yay turtles! Other than that, not much to report. It’s kind of quiet up here, so it’s not like I have a lot of adventures to detail. Well, I guess I could give more details about the turtle research.
Last night, most of the turtles we found were in the small meadow, but my son and I found one really exciting turtle in the far wooded meadow. Earlier in the day, I had removed an exclosure from one of last year’s nests, thinking that it would be good to get it out of the way in case another turtle, or even the same one, wanted to nest there. Guess what? We found a turtle nesting less than one foot away from the old nest. I don’t know yet if it was the same turtle, but if it is that is really exciting.
The other cool thing is that we found the turtle right after she finished nesting, so we didn’t have to wait around for her to finish. I love that turtle. #228. Bless her heart. Turtles are awfully cute.
In other news, my son and I held a king snake today, caught by Erika. Super cute! My son wants to get a snake as a pet, and I’m thinking about agreeing to that one. Oh, and I have lost the cables and charger for the field camera. That does not make me happy. I hope they turn up soon. We’re off to the field site in a few minutes, so I think I’ll call this one a wrap. Is that how they say it in Hollywood?
Cobb Mountain
Western Section Poster
Me and Nicole Christie, coauthors on “Timing of Nesting and Nest Site Selection in a Northern California Population of Western Pond Turtles (Emys marmorata),” presented at the Annual Meeting of the Western Section of The Wildlife Society, in Riverside, California.
Turtle Research
This all came about last semester when i was speaking with my advisor about possibilities for senior thesis topics. Dr. Derek Girman, my advisor, suggested that i speak with Dr. Nick Geist, as he does the kind of vertebrate stuff that interests me (he is also a paleontologist, which is also stuff that I love). As it happened, while Dr. Girman and i were talking about this, Dr. Geist walked by and saw us talking – he must have had a psychic moment because he veered over to join us, and a couple of minutes later he’d agreed to help me come up with a project in his lab. A couple of weeks later, he invited me to be part of one of his big research projects and join the Turtle Team. Dr. Geist is one of my favorite professors, and I was thrilled to be accepted into his lab as an undergrad!
After some discussion, we decided that I would work on nest site fidelity – whether or not females return to the same location year after year to nest. I’m also interested in whether or not they return to their natal sites – the place where they themselves were born – but that might be outside then scope of what in will be able to research given the time I have to work on this project.
So, over the summer, I spent a lot of time up in Lake County at our research site, helping one of the grad students with her project, and also beginning to collect data of my own. The main project involved tracking females who had come out of the water to nest. Sometimes, we just followed them and monitored them while they were nesting so we could get a count of their eggs afterward. (Later, the eggs were removed to be incubated in our lab to be head-started by one of the local zoos and released about a year from now). Sometimes, we tracked them using radio telemetry equipment – we glued transmitters to their backs, and then tracked them to their nests that way. Mostly, the work involved tromping around a really beautiful location up in Lake County, grabbing up turtles (who almost always peed on us when we picked them up), and keeping track of the nests they laid. I also collected soil samples from all nest sites, and got GPS data for nest locations. Since most of the work took place in the early evening (we were usually in the field from about four in the afternoon until nine or ten at night), so we camped overnight instead of making the long drive home. Super fun!
We went up there a couple of days a week during June, until the end of the nesting season. Later in the summer, we went back up to help collect eggs, and also to release the baby turtles who had hatched last yes, and been raised in zoos. That was also lot of fun, except my boots kept getting stuck in the mud.
Now that the semester has started, there isn’t any field work until next year, so I’m working with data – plotting my location coordinates on a map and eventually I’ll get down to analyzing my soil samples. Dr. Geist wants me to put together a poster and present it next year at a conference, so I’ll be working on that, too, eventually. OH YEAH TURTLES!
A Photo of Me!
If you’re wondering about the black thing on the turtle’s back, it’s a radio transmitter. This gravid female had been captured the night before and given an ID number, weighed and measured, and fitted with a transmitter. Then, she spent the night in my car. This photo was taken right before she was released back into the lake the next morning. Then, over the next few days, her radio frequency was monitored each evening in the hopes of finding her out of the water and laying her eggs.