In the News

The Chronicle
February 9, 2005

The Lloyd Center for the Environment is happy to announce the arrival of two baby Diamondback Terrapins. The terrapins, classified in the Massachusetts Endangered Species Act as a threatened species, arrived recently at the Nature Center to be head-started prior to their release in the wild later this year.

Baby terrapins have a very high mortality rate the first year of life, and often fall prey to raccoons, skunks, herons or other predators. “Being kept safe and well fed in an indoor environment throughout the frigid New England winter provides a real boost to the species,” according to Mark Mello, the Director of Research at the Lloyd Center. “In the wild, these baby terrapins, no bigger than a quarter, emerge in the autumn, and then need to get through the first winter without eating anything at all, or certainly not much.”

Mello added, ”We keep the terrapins at an elevated temperature, much as they would experience in the summer, and we basically feed them as much as we can. The growth they exhibit over the winter is phenomenal, and by spring, they can be the same size as a three to four-year old turtle. Head-starting is important because it gets the turtle past its most vulnerable stage, and then it can be released back to the estuary from which it came.”

Although once terrapins were plentiful in this area, local populations have dwindled due to a multitude of reasons including habitat destruction, predation by other animals, and harvesting by man. Although much of the turtle hunting took place a century ago, “turtle soup is still a commercially viable business, particularly in the Chesapeake Bay area, ” remarked Mello.

“Recently we asked the question, ‘what is the status of the terrapin population in this area?’ and we just didn’t know the answer. There hadn’t been any systematic research done locally, although some turtles had been spotted from Wareham to Dartmouth,” added Mello.

Thus, the South Coast Terrapin Consortium, or SCUTES, was formed as a research team in 2002 to conduct a study of the terrapin populations in Buzzards Bay. Consortium members include the Lloyd Center, Buttonwood Park Zoo, the Dartmouth YMCA, Dartmouth Natural Resources Trust (DNRT), Tabor Academy, and Mass Audubon Society. Some funding was provided by the Natural Heritage and Endangered Species Program. In addition to the terrapin head-starting efforts, the research team and volunteers monitor field sites looking for turtles, and nest sites.

“It is quite difficult to find a turtle nest site, unless you actually come across a female laying eggs. When we did find a complete nest, we’d put up a Predator Exclosure to keep the predators out. When the eggs hatched, or we found hatchlings in the wild, we would bring them back to the New Bedford zoo to be head-started, ” explained Mello. “More often, we’d find predated nest sites, and we could only count the egg shells lying there. Sometimes, the nest would be partially predated, and we would dig up the rest of the eggs for incubation at the zoo.” In 2003, the first year of the project, the Lloyd Center sponsored intern, Red Carney, coordinated and conducted the fieldwork. This year, the Buttonwood Park Zoo is serving as the supervisor in conjunction with a Lloyd Center intern, Sean Kent.

The terrapins are located on the top floor of the Lloyd Center main building. The Lloyd Center is located at 430 Potomska Road on 55 acres of pristine salt marsh, maritime forest and wetlands at the mouth of the Slocums River in Dartmouth.

This story appeared in the Chronicle on 2/9/05