The Adopt-A-Turtle program is designed to help sustain a long-term research project that can actively engage Washburn University students in field biology education. This program will enable students (from all interested departments) to meaningfully experience animal handling and care, conservation, research and community engagement.
One major challenge in working with animals in their natural habitat is relocating specific individuals each time data needs to be collected on the animals. For our box turtle research at Washburn, we study individual movement and patterns to better understand the drivers and consequences of variable decision making and subsequent habitat use. To collect these data, we pit tag individual turtles (like you do for your dog and/or cat) and place radio transmitters on each animal so that they can be relocated in the future. Being able to reliably relocate specific individuals enables us to do long-term monitoring of individuals and populations, which is important when populations are small, or individuals are highly inconspicuous (such as box turtles) yet long-lived. Close monitoring of specific animals can help reveal important resources and location requirements that individuals need and can also help us determine population stability. Being able to detect early warning signals for population decline is critical for effective conservation, and the ornate box turtle is already considered an imperiled species throughout most of its range.
The Need
To get this program started, our goal for Day of Giving is to raise $5,000. Your contributions to this program will be used to help fund student research projects and box turtle conservation. More specifically, the funds we raise will be used to purchase radio transmitters for individual turtles ($150 apiece, replaced yearly), temperature-sensing pit tags and field equipment for research students and field courses to use including telemetry equipment (radio receivers and Yagi antennas, $900), GPS’s, field scales, calipers and antibiotics/supplies to treat unhealthy or wounded animals.
The equipment used for research and teaching will also be used during community engagement events. With additional equipment we can more effectively teach radio telemetry to groups including Nature Nuts and kids camps at the Topeka Zoo and Conservation Center (which we do throughout the summer) and expand our education outreach for larger groups as well.
For more information about this project, visit wu-turtle.weebly.com.
