The secret life of box turtles
Did you know that box
turtles are sociable? They sometimes hang out together without any
apparent mating or territorial maneuvering going on.
Did you know that female
box turtles have much larger home ranges than males do? (Up to 50 acres
vs. 7 acres or less.) This may be because the females sometimes travel
long distances pretty fast when the time comes to lay their eggs. Take
a look at that long, skinny red polygon above as an example of
beeline-to-the-nest-site behavior.
A male box turtle, on
the other hand, might spend his entire summer under the same blackberry
bush subsisting on fallen fruit, worms, and bugs. Perhaps this is why
male turtles have lower levels of stress hormones in their blood than
females do?
Marcel Weigand
discovered all this and more with the help of both human and canine
field assistants who found, tagged, then revisited several test
subjects over the course of last year. She shared her findings at the
Athens Public Library Saturday and, impressively, one of four teenage
neighbors willingly sat through the entire hour.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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The teenage neighbor who sat through the lecture will probably end up being a biologist or in a similar field.
BTW, The Turtles were a 60s rock group: https : / / www . youtube . com / watch ?v = FVjxyny4Lpo
NJoy