Turtle Tracking

[Abby Brown] I'm at the education center at Nahant Marsh, and look who I found! This is Captain, the Blanding's turtle. Isn't he adorable? Blanding's turtles love marshes like Nahant Marsh. They love the water, but also like being on land, so this is the perfect place for them. But the amount of Blanding's turtles in Iowa is going down because it's natural habitat is disappearing. We cannot let these guys become extinct. But what can we do about it? Well, the naturalists here at Nahant Marsh have a really cool plan. Let's go learn more about it!

[Abby] This is my friend Levi, and this is Jimmy, and he's got a great plan for tracking turtles. Tell me all about it.

[Jimmy Wiebler] Yeah, so we're going to go out there and find some Blanding's turtles. Here at Nahant Marsh we research Blanding's turtles. Blanding's turtles are a threatened species in Iowa. There's not as many as there used to be. So we protect them by researching them. We study them, we learn more about them, and so by tracking their movement patters, we can learn how they use the local landscape here at Nahant Marsh. And we can learn about things like where are they nesting at? If we know where they're nesting, we can better protect those locations and if we know how they're using the landscape we can create wetlands, more wetlands, for them to use. So learning more about them helps us to protect the species. Especially the local population of Blanding's turtles here.

[Abby] What is this fancy contraption that you have?

[Jimmy] So, this is how we find them. Right now we have adult Blanding's turtles with little transmitters on them.

[Abby] What's a transmitter?

[Jimmy] A transmitter is just a little device that has a little antenna on it and we glue that to the turtle's shell and this antenna and receiver can pick up that signal from the turtle shell, and it's going to beep at us and tell us which direction we need to head to find the turtle.

[Abby] Even though we're using technology to try to find Blanding's turtles, we should probably find out a little more about their behavior and what they look like.

[Jimmy] The best way to identify a Blanding's turtle is by their yellow chin and neck, they have a bright yellow chin and neck. And if you look closely at their mouth, they actually have an up-turned mouth and it actually looks like their smiling at you. And so their very charismatic turtles. They're from the Midwest, it's a midwestern turtle, there's some populations on the eastern coast, but for the most part it's a midwestern turtle. Blanding's turtles, just like a lot of other turtles, are omnivores. An omnivore is something that eats both meat and plants. They eat crawdads, dragonfly nymphs, but they'll also eat some of the vegetation, or the plants that are living in the marsh as well. Blanding's turtles need shallow wetlands and that's what a marsh is; usually a shallow type of wetland with cattails and other types of aquatic plants growing in them.

[Abby] Let's go find some turtles! As Jimmy points the antenna in different directions, we hear a beep. The louder the beep, the more likely it is that a turtle with a transmitter on its back is in that direction. Remember, turtles could be on land, or in the water, or even the mud of the marsh. I'm going in! This is one of the muddiest adventures I've ever been on. There are so many different kinds of places turtles can hide. After a long game of hide and seek, we finally found a Blanding's turtle! But, how does tracking these turtles help them?

[Jimmy] After we find a turtle, we'll mark it's GPS coordinates and GPS coordinates we can put those in to Google Maps, just like you would use to find directions if you're going somewhere for a vacation or something like that in the car. And so we take the GPS coordinates and we can put them all together and we can look at what dates those turtles were at those certain locations and learn about how they're moving across the landscape by looking at those coordinates.

[Abby] And when you know where they're moving, how they're moving, and where they're at, what does that mean to you?

[Jimmy] So that helps us better protect those locations. Blanding's turtles will use certain locations and the better we know how they use those locations, the better we can protect them.

[Abby] The Blanding's turtle is native to Iowa, but is becoming more and more rare these days. They definitely are here at Nahant Marsh though, right in the middle of a city! Can you think of other habitats in other cities in Iowa and why they could be so important? Thanks for hanging out with us today!

[Announcer] Funding for FIND Iowa has been provided by the following supporters.

(text on screen Find Iowa, Coons Foundation, Pella, REAP-CEP, Gilchrist Foundation)

(text on screen Iowa PBS Education)