The Orianne Society has now been working on Spotted Turtle research projects since 2014, and they have become one of our primary focal species in recent years.
Truthfully, while my job was to find indigos as part of The Orianne Society’s annual occupancy surveys, I also wanted to find the far more elusive Florida Pine Snake… they’re both striking and cryptic, spending the majority of their lives in rodent burrows underground.
We examined how leaf breakdown and invertebrate communities varied across three species of leaf litter: longleaf pine needles, wiregrass stalks, and black gum leaves. These species all occur naturally in pine flatwoods wetlands, with gum trees being mostly restricted to fire-suppressed wetlands or the deepest parts of fire-maintained wetlands.