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I'm Willem Roosenburg, I'm an associate professor
of biological sciences at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio
This is the end of our 2008 field season
My lifelong career has become
the steward of diamonback terrapins in the state of Maryland
I'm involved in the project on Poplar Island
because there are a large number of turtles nesting there
My job is to keep track of the number of turtles
that are on the island
One of the ideas that's, sort of, floating around
in my head is, what is the importance of these island habitats
that we have throughout Chesapeake Bay
with regard to the general health of terrapin populations
throughout the Bay
Usually around Memorial Day weekend, the females
will start coming ashore to lay eggs
Ok, let's keep an eye out for hatchling tracks and see what we can find
The major predators are raccoons and foxes
The really neat thing about Poplar Island
is that there are no nest predators out there
When we do find a terrapin nest, we will actually
dig up that nest
And the first thing we do is we look at the eggs
that are inside that nest
and then mark it so we can relocate that nest
in about 50 days
90 degrees west, waypoint number 218
There are so few nests that survive the raccoons
and the nest predators
Poplar truly represents a unique opportunity
to learn a great deal about a life cycle
which otherwise is very difficult to study
because of nest predation
OK, here's a nest with babies in it
Let's get them out
Much of what I've learned about the nesting biology
of terrapins has occurred in the last 5 years of my work
Let me just do a quick little check here
So, at the 50-day point, we make a ring
out of aluminum flashing
The purpose of the ring is simply to catch
the hatchlings when they come out and
to prevent them from escaping
And then, once that ring is in place
every day, hopefully twice a day, we check
that nest to see if the hatchlings are emerged
Let's keep an eye out for hatchlings along the fence, especially
And, of course, we're checking the rings to see
if we can find any baby turtles inside of them
Looking, looking, looking, constantly looking
Once we've caught the hatchlings, we bring them back to our lab
Ok, so these are little hatchlings that have
emerged from Poplar Island in the last few days
One of the things is they're incredibly small
about the size of a quarter
We also take the same series of measurements
that we take everywhere else
We also put a little scute notch
We tag them using a small, binary-coded wire tag
and we inject it into the right rear leg
As a consequence of having this tag
when we recapture these animals, we will be able to
identify and distinguish all turtles
that come from Poplar Island
We hold the animals for 24 hours here, just to make sure
that they haven't lost that little coded wire tag
After 24 hours, the animals are released into the wild
So, these little guys will be making their way
into the salt marsh here
If you think about turtles and the fact that
longevity is really important, and that a female's
just got to make it through a couple of those
predator cycles to successfully reproduce
then it may be that these islands are really important
and becoming more important
He doesn't want to go
OK, guys, have fun
So, hopefully, we'll see these guys in a few years