Number 175!

A self-portrait of the bicycling biologist ready to take #175 home.

AFTER FOUR DAYS AND NINE HOURS OF BICYCLE RIDING I FINALLY CAUGHT A TURTLE!

This male Western pond turtle is sleeping quietly just before I administer the reversal medication status post gastric lavage. As you can see the turtles a quite relaxed and not aware of the procedure. Ten minutes later it was wide awake and twenty minutes later he was ambulating.

Here he is twenty minutes later moving his foot (left) and smiling.

The cool thing is that this is another turtle that I have not caught before and that means there are 13 turtles in this drainage ditch that is about 100 meters long. So, it should be easy to catch them, or so it seems. After spending three hours with my radio telemetry unit I found out they are living in the dense bulrushes where the crayfish and Odonate naiads are feeding. 

After this year's work of examining the ecosystem for food resources I can identify discrete  body parts and determine what they ate. The picture below shows what I face when I am examining stomach contents. Two years ago it was baffling, last year somewhat confusing, but now it is an interesting forensics like exploration. 

Odonate tissue near the end of
the digestion process.

Certainly this kind of work is not for everybody. However, I am fortunate that body fluids and parts do not bother me. It allows me to do this kind of work and also helped me earn my way through university doing nursing, ER, and Trauma Center work. 

One interesting thing in the photograph below is that I find pieces of the bank soil and vegetation their food resources cling to. Many researchers in the past mistakenly thought the Western pond turtles eat these items. I know this is the substrate the prey live on and that turtles take a big bite and get the prey and anything nearby. Often scientists like everybody else are myopic and their focus it too narrow and this leads to mistakes. 

The light brown is part of a plant and the darker material is soil from the bank that is ingested.

That's it for now. Tomorrow a cool video of a leech and more.