Research assistant Molly Wright on the trail for radio-tagged turtles. (Photo by David Sommerstein)
Driving on country roads can sometimes be like navigating an obstacle course of wildlife – deer, skunks, raccoons, frogs, and throughout much of the summer – turtles. Turtles like to lay their eggs along roadsides and become easy candidates for road kill. They live and reproduce for decades, so when an adult is killed prematurely, it can have a big effect on turtle populations as a whole. Researchers are trying to find out how often turtles cross the road and how to help them get safely to the other side. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s David Sommerstein reports:
Transcript
Driving on country roads can sometimes be like navigating an obstacle course of wildlife – deer,
skunks, raccoons, frogs, and throughout much of the summer – turtles. Turtles like to lay their
eggs along roadsides and become easy candidates for roadkill. They live and reproduce for
decades, so when an adult is killed prematurely, it can have a big effect on turtle populations as a
whole. Researchers are trying to find out how often turtles cross the road and how to help them
get safely to the other side. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s David Sommerstein reports:
Tom Langen starts his day around 6 in the morning on the shoulder of a two-lane road in northern
New York State. He walks along and counts roadkill.
“We like to get out early before the traffic gets bad, but also before the crows and other animals
have drug everything away.”
When he finds a dead snapping turtle, he nudges it off the road and bends down to study it.
“So this is a female. It’s pretty mangled. Unfortunately I can’t see any of the banding on her
shell.”
Each morning, he’ll find two or three like this. Langen’s a biology professor at Clarkson
University. He specializes in animal behavior. He’s trying to figure out whether a few smooshed
turtles a day is a little problem or a big one for the species as a whole.
His hypothesis is that it is a big problem. Turtles can live more than 60 years. And they have a
higher reproduction rate the older they get.
“So the old individuals are very important, and the older they are, the more important they are.”
Turtles like to live in marshes or ponds. But they like to lay their eggs in drier places. In what
Langen describes as a cruel twist of ecological fate, road berms are perfect. They’re dry, sandy,
and often close to marshes.
“The turtles have evolved over millions of years certain cues of what makes a good nesting site.
And by chance the roads that we’ve built in the last 50 to 75 years have some of those features
that match that so they’re tricked into going to those places.”
To figure out how many turtles are tricked into playing chicken with cars, Langen and his
research assistants catch turtles in nets. They inject them with a tag that identifies each
individual. So when they find a dead one, they know who it is.
They also want to know how far the turtles range. So they attach tiny radio transmitters to turtles’
shells and track their movements. That job falls to research assistant Molly Wright.
“Umm, we’re going to go after a snapping turtle. It’s a snapping turtle that we found in a swamp
by the Grasse River.”
(sound of sloshing water)
It’s known only as “Turtle #6”. Wright slogs waist deep through a marsh just off the highway.
She slings a radio receiver over her shoulder and holds an antenna like the one you’d put atop
your house.
“Yeah. That’s the noise that the radio antenna telemetry device makes for the turtle, so it’s a
pretty distinctive sound. It’s straight in front of us somewhere, the turtle is.”
We trudge slowly past green lilypads into the middle of the marsh. We clutch long grasses to
keep our footing among the muck and submerged logs. Wright sweep the antenna left and right.
She looks like a radio statue of liberty.
“People see us pretty regularly on like their drives to and from work and people bicycle. There’s
one man who pulled over and he’s like, “what’s up with that girl with the antenna on her head?”
“You see that moving right there?” “Yeah.” “That’s the turtle. It’s moving in the lilies.”
“Right there?” “Yup.” “That’s him right there. Turtle #6 has been found.”
Wright jots down the GPS coordinates, water temperature, and other observations in a notebook.
She notices we’re only several feet from the road. Of the 15 turtles she’s tracking, about a third
have crossed.
“I can’t make any conclusions from it because I haven’t done the stats yet, but you see a lot of
dead turtles on the road.”
The team of researchers will compile data over the next three years. They hope to get a sense of
how many turtles live in the area and what percentage of them get run over. Lead scientist Tom
Langen says, ironically, some of these turtles are older than the roads they’re getting killed on.
“It would be a terrible tragedy to remove these animals from our environment and over a brief
period of fifty years because of our traffic activities. I’d like to see those populations preserved
and maintained in good numbers. My daughter likes to see them, and I want her to see them as
well.”
Langen says his research could give road engineers a mandate to design fences, baffles, and
passageways that could keep turtles and other animals out of harm’s way. He cautions drivers to
be careful near wetlands, and if they see a dead turtle, odds are more turtles are trying to cross the
road nearby.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m David Sommertein.