Ben StegengaViews:
The Bittersweet End of a Spotted Turtle Field Season
Wrapping up a field project can elicit a wide range of emotions, often depending on how smoothly the project went, how difficult the fieldwork was, and how closely you worked with animals. There’s usually a strong sense of accomplishment, and for those projects that seem to test your limits, overwhelming relief.
However, many times it’s also bittersweet, especially projects where you get to know individual animals for long periods of time. You’re given this unique opportunity to intimately observe and learn about the lives of individual animals as they attempt to survive harsh weather events, evade predators, successfully forage, and ultimately reproduce. It’s a small window into their private lives, that few people get, but eventually the curtains have to close.
The goal is always to conduct unbiased objective science, and I think we do a good job of that, but it’s impossible to study these amazing animals and not care about them. It’s what drives us as conservationists. I think most ecologists would agree that it’s pretty hard to not become attached to your study animals, at least a little bit.
Studying Spotted Turtle Reproductive Ecology
Just last week we wrapped up the fieldwork of such a project, investigating the reproductive ecology of Spotted Turtles (Clemmys guttata). The goal of the project was to see how changing climate and land use might impact reproduction in Spotted Turtles across their range. We wanted to see specifically what microhabitat conditions were available for nesting turtles, and how variation in temperature and soil moisture might affect, hatchling success, development, and vitality. It’s a pretty simple question, but the process of answering it was anything but. It ultimately required several stages of fieldwork and lab work spanning an entire year.
Tracking Nesting Behavior in Wild Spotted Turtles
This first step was to catch some female Spotted Turtles in early spring at one of our long-term monitoring sites, attach radio transmitters, and track them regularly, so we could determine when they were going to nest. Once we could feel calcified eggs inside a turtle, we attached a thread bobbin to her, allowing us to follow her exact movements.
The process was tedious, but it led us directly to more than a dozen nests, and simultaneously showed us how the turtles move across the site in the days leading up to nesting. The regular tracking also gave us insight into the daily lives of these turtles.
We observed feeding, courtship, and basking, and got to see how individuals preferred different areas and how their home ranges differed in size. It also revealed that Spotted Turtles can lay up to four clutches of eggs in a season, something that had never been observed in the wild before! Over those six months, Kira and I got to know those turtles about as well as anyone could know a wild Spotted Turtle.
Monitoring Spotted Turtle Nests and Hatchlings
In August, after the nesting season had come to a close, we removed the transmitters from the turtles and wished them well, hoping that we’d see them again next spring. But the fieldwork was far from over.
We had traded tracking turtles for nest checks, and as this was the first time anyone had attempted to monitor nests and collect hatchlings in the Southeast, there was a bit of guesswork involved. Unsure of exactly how long incubation would take, someone had to be in the field every day to make sure we weren’t missing a hatching event.
Anxiety rose with every passing day that didn’t result in baby turtles, but eventually our persistence paid off, and we ended up with 13 healthy hatchling Spotted Turtles!
Studying Hatchling Growth and Fitness
We brought these turtles into a lab at Georgia Southern University to monitor their growth and measure fitness through weekly righting trials. These types of trials are a common way to measure a turtle’s righting response and how long it takes them to flip themselves over after being placed upside down (don’t worry, we helped them out if they didn’t flip over after a short while).
We kept the hatchlings over the winter, and collected over 4 months of righting response and growth data that we can now compare with the temperature data from their respective nests, and see how the conditions of the nest sites compare to the other environmental data we collected across the site.
Meanwhile, our collaborators at The Smithsonian and Zoo New England conducted the exact same research in Massachusetts to see if the effects are similar in northern populations. This will hopefully paint a picture of how climate change or habitat alteration might affect these imperiled turtles across their range in the years to come, and how we can better conserve them.
It was my first time raising hatchling turtles, and it was amazing to see how quickly they grew week-to-week. Before I knew it, they had doubled and tripled in size. Their appetites grew as well, and eventually some turtles had achieved weights more than six times what they were at hatching!
While head-starting was not the purpose of this research, it was a welcome side-effect, hopefully allowing these turtles a much better chance at survival into adulthood once back in the wild.
Returning Hatchling Spotted Turtles to the Wetlands
That brings us to this month. Our 2026 Spotted Turtle survey season is underway and last week, we were back at the site where this project started. We finally had enough water and suitable temperatures to do our annual surveys and to release the turtles whose journey we’ve been a part of for almost a year.
Throughout that survey week, we saw a lot of familiar faces, including many of the females that we spent countless hours tracking last year and whose offspring were being released. I’m sure everyone was relieved, turtles and biologists alike, that we will not be tracking them again this year.
Just some quick measurements and photos, and they were back in the water to go about their lives.
The hatchlings were also eager to go as we took our final measurements and placed them in the water one by one. They quickly scurried into the submerged leaf litter on the wetland floor, their bright yellow speckles vanishing in a matter of moments. A few poked their heads back up above the surface to take a breath and look at us one last time before continuing deeper into cover.
I know we won’t see them all again, but hopefully just like their mothers, a few will become regulars on our surveys, and we’ll see them for many years to come.
