Saving a Species, One Turtle at a Time

In the Mississippi Delta, scientists are painstakingly gathering data to help determine if the alligator snapping turtle needs protection.

My aunt stopped for turtles. If she saw a box turtle crawling across the black tar pavement of Mississippi State Highway 364, she’d pull the car over, tires crunching the gravel shoulder, and send us kids out to rescue it. She knew that the unique body structure of turtles — the shells, which get the credit for helping the species survive for billions of years — was not enough to defend them from cars, trucks, or people. My aunt knew they needed our help too, though we were not allowed to keep the rescued turtles. She insisted they be left hidden in a nearby ditch or tangle of weeds, away from the road, able to live out their lives as nature intended.

Researchers are surveying the number of alligator snapping turtles throughout its range, which extends across the rivers that flow into the Gulf of Mexico. Photo of Luke Pearson and Lucas Haralson courtesy of Luke Pearson.

Scientists agree with my aunt that armor alone cannot protect turtles from the threats posed by modern society. What she knew from experience, scientists know from collecting and analyzing data. They know that hundreds of species of turtles worldwide are threatened or have already disappeared as habitats shrink and illegal harvesting grows for food, traditional medicines, and exotic pet trades.

In the United States, one of the many species conservationists fear for is the alligator snapping turtle, the largest freshwater turtle in North America. Capable of living for six or seven decades, sometimes even longer, their numbers are in such decline that in 2012 the Center for Biological Diversity petitioned the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to consider protecting the species under the Endangered Species Act.

To decide if these giants are truly endangered, experts help the USFWS gather the facts, one turtle at a time.

That is why I find myself sitting on an ice chest, lodged between backpacks, water bottles, and equipment bags, heading upstream on the Tallahatchie River. Despite the thick sticky heat of the Mississippi Delta in July, I want to see how biologists Luke Pearson and Lucas Haralson, graduate students at the University of Southern Mississippi, survey the number and types of turtles living in the muddy gumbo of the river. Across the alligator snappers’ range — the rivers that flow into the Gulf of Mexico — herpetologists have conducted similar surveys. The work this summer will add to our understanding of freshwater turtles and their changing environments as well as provide the data needed to determine whether the alligator snappers need new federal protection.

The researchers arrived in Oxford, Mississippi in June hauling a 16-foot boat packed with hoop traps and PVC poles and ice chests to the cabin behind our house where they stayed as our guests. Their makeshift lab, complete with microscopes, hand-held pipettors, and specimen vials, shared space with our ping-pong table. When the door of the cabin opened, the air delivered a whiff of dead fish mixed with ethanol, a solution used to preserve tissue samples.

Each morning, they hauled the boat, filled with bait and traps as well as their data books, cameras, and other equipment, to remote boat ramps scattered along rivers and lakes in the Mississippi Delta. When they returned in the evenings, I eagerly asked about their daily counts. I knew little about the turtles they found — the red-earred sliders, softshell spinies, coots, musks, and when they were lucky, the alligator snappers. I wanted to learn more.

“We have an extra seat in the boat,” Pearson said to me one evening. “You can go with us sometime if you want.”

THE TALLAHATCHIE RIVER twists and turns for 230 miles through the Yazoo Basin, a watershed that extends from the hills of northcentral Mississippi to the state’s western boundary, the Mississippi River. The muddy clay bottom of the Tallahatchie and other rivers and streams in the drainage basin — such as the Yocona, Yallobusha, and Tillatoba — provides the shelter and food that should sustain alligator snapping turtles and their freshwater cousins. Will the data confirm that they still live hidden beneath these waters?

Days before I traveled with them, the team set 23 traps along a two-mile stretch of the Tallahatchie. Today, we are checking and rebaiting their traps with large chunks of fish, measuring, examining, and releasing any turtles lured into the netting.

​The muddy clay bottom of the Tallahatchie provides the shelter and food that should sustain alligator snapping turtles. Photo by Luke Pearson.

From my seat on the ice chest, I absorb the view of the river while Haralson scans the banks, his trained eyes spotting red-eared sliders and map turtles basking in the sun. These sightings become the first numbers recorded for the day, each one adding to our general understanding of the turtles who continue to live in the river.

Soon Pearson steers the boat alongside a fallen tree where a rope extends from a branch to a semi-submerged trap. With a single motion, Haralson grabs the trap and flips it upside down onto the bow. Water, mud, and a heap of struggling turtles, their claws scrapping against aluminum, engulf the boat. Haralson calls out what he sees: two, no three sliders, four spinies, two alligator snappers.

All I see are gaping mouths and slinging mud. I raise my feet as a grumpy soft-shell spinie scuttles to a corner.

Immediately the work begins, and I get a quick lesson in turtle anatomy as Pearson pulls a female alligator snapper from the netting. I learn the term carapace, or top shell, and the term plastron, the bottom shell, and run my hands over the scutes, the hard scales that fortify the carapace. The alligator snapper looks like a creature straight out of Jurassic Park, with three rows of spikey keels down her back and strong beaked jaws capable of crunching fish, mussels, and the bodies of dead birds and mammals. Despite its pre-historic appearance, the shell’s intricate geometric designs in shades of brown, gray, and olive makes the alligator snapper a walking canvas of art.

“Want to hold her?” Pearson asks.

He shows me how to slide my left hand down the carapace and tuck my fingers firmly under the shell above the turtle’s tail.

“Put your right hand here,” he says, guiding it to a spot immediately behind the turtle’s thick neck. “It’s the only place where her mouth can’t reach you.”

I taste sweat on my upper lip and feel bubbles rising in my chest. The deadweight of the 25-pound young female surprises me as my fingers grip her beautiful body tightly. I’ve never held a soul this wild before.

WITH MY RUDIMENTARY introduction to turtle anatomy complete, the team puts me to work. As they examine and measure the turtles, I record numbers — weight, 36.1 pounds; carapace length, 40.3 cm; carapace width 33.1 cm. I mark the alligator snappers as“MT,”an abbreviation of their scientific name, Macrochelys temmincki, and assign each a distinct number.

The work moves quickly and within minutes, the first MT returns to her watery home. I’ve preserved details about her life, now translated into nine individual pieces of data, in a three-ring binder. Only her data will leave this bend of the river.

As we travel to other trap sites, I scan the data book and see questions and stories emerging from the numbers. Zero. That’s the number of alligator snapping turtles the team found after eight days of grabbing and flipping traps in an oxbow lake that they thought was an ideal habitat. Why were there no alligator snappers?

Fifty-nine. At another site, the team trapped 59 alligator snappers over a four-day period. Most of these turtles weighed 30 to 40 pounds or less, indicating that there were few older turtles — which weigh 70 to 80 pounds or more — among them. Maybe, Pearson suggests, the parents of these 59 turtles had been caught and sold for meat decades earlier.

Twenty-seven. In a swamp further south, the team grabbed and flipped 27 alligator snappers from the traps in a single day, including ten males each weighing 100 pounds or more. They also captured one of the heaviest females on record weighing 72.6 pounds. How had this group of older turtles survived so well in this habitat?

By the end of the day, I begin to understand the story the numbers tell us about where and how the turtles live in specific drainage areas. They also remind me that the often-tedious process of collecting facts, and not just anecdotes, must be the goal of science. By trusting the method that scientists follow — asking questions, gathering and analyzing the data, sharing what they find with others, repeated over and over — we can better understand how modern society affects the environment and how we can be better stewards of the Earth.

Weeks later, as the nights cool and the river temperatures drop, the turtles will become less active and won’t seek the easy food offered in the traps. The field season will end, and the research team will compile the numbers and submit reports to the USFWS and the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks. With data collated from across river basins, experts will decide whether these beautiful giants need the heightened protection of the Endangered Species Act. Regardless of that decision, the months of physically demanding but careful data collection will contribute to what we know about the turtles and their habitats. The summer of grabbing and flipping traps will lead to improved education, policy, and conservation practices.

While others study the numbers, I’ll do what my aunt taught me. I know as she did that the turtles’ shells are not enough to safeguard them from their biggest threat — our modern world. I also know what the scientists know — that each remarkable turtle holds the facts we need to understand how the flow of our lives affects the species and their changing ecosystems. Stopping for turtles will be my way to protect the species, one turtle at a time.

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