We have to say goodbye to one of the first Eastern Box turtles we decided to research on the Edge.
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| EOA2 (Hoffa) 2019 Photo by Sam James |
EOA 2 (
see previous blog post from January 22, 2016) was found expired at the end of November. This was a few weeks after our first freeze accompanied by the first snow of the season on Nov. 11 2019. Possibly, this Eastern box turtle, froze to death before getting to its over wintering spot for the season. But it did turn up the past summer missing a leg, which may have led to complications with movement or infection. No other visual evidence of attack, disease or fungus appears to be the cause, but freezing is an assumption. EOA2 was the second turtle we glued a transmitter on in 2014 and have been following its activity for 5 years.
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| EOA2 out and about flaunting the transmitter on its back. |
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| See EOA2 buried in the soil to the right of a the GPS unit. This is all the deeper it needs to be to survive winter. |
This turtle was visited via telemetry by at least 100 students helping to track its movements. From 2014 until 2019, EOA 2 was followed to better understand the habits of Eastern box turtles on the preserve. The map below shows the recorded range of the area this turtle moved in 5 years. It was never found outside the yellow circle on the map which is over 30 acres and a perimeter of almost a mile. Robyn Wright-Strauss, who has been researching the turtles here commented that this is a much larger range than estimated in publications. EOA2 liked to move!
On this Northwestern slope of the preserve, the turtle used 2 overwintering spots over the five years, marked as orange dots in the map above. We learned that it would bury itself shallowly under the leaves in these two depressions in the ground and remain there from November until April.
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| Multiple locations were documented over the 5 year period |
This box turtle was first picked up in the parking lot of the Eulett Center. It was never found accidentally over the 5 years, but only when we searched for it via radio telemetry. We have transmitters on other box turtles in the same area, but we have learned the most from this original capture. We will learn more in the future from the other turtles, but as our first, EOA2 will always be the example of turtle behavior. For us, this turtle was the leader.
Posted by: Mark Zloba
