Article published
My Turn
Wild beauties What turtles tell me about
humans' unwise ways
By David Carroll
For the Monitor
Last week,
In talking about turtles, I am happy to be able to avoid using the
"canary in the coal mine" analogy applied to frogs, salamanders,
trout and other life forms most vulnerable to human degradation of the
biosphere. If turtles go belly up due to our host of pollutants and other
environmental stresses, it is likely that we - the human species, Homo sapiens,
"wise man,"as we have so modestly named ourselves -will have preceded
them.
As a venerably ancient and remarkably unchanged group, turtles are
incredibly well-adapted to living on Earth. Considered "evolutionarily
conservative," they have stayed essentially the same, more so perhaps than
any other four-legged vertebrate, since their appearance in the fossil record
some 250 million years ago.
These slow and deliberate animals, which we count in such sad numbers
crushed on roads as they attempt to continue to follow seemingly timeless
pathways, have ebbed and flowed with eons of Earth's fitful and often extreme
upheavals and transitions: the advance and retreat of glaciers, volcanic
eruptions, impacts of asteroids and whatever else it was that took away the
dinosaurs.
Turtles have adapted to environments as diverse as deserts and oceans,
forests and plains, swamps and marshes, rivers and streams. It is more than
their famous shells - a unique rearrangement of the vertebrate body plan - that
has enabled them to persist.
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There are turtles in our part of the glaciated Northeast
that can go for up to six months under the mud of winter wetlands,
at temperatures of around 36 degrees without access
to oxygen (there is zero oxygen below as little as three millimeters of mud).
Other species can go as long without air-breathing, submerged in oxygenated
water.
They can pass half a year or more in hibernation without eating. Hatchling
painted turtles can, and far more often they do, survive entire winters in
nests in the earth in which temperatures fall well below freezing. A hatchling
painted turtle digging out of a nest in late May could well have spent an
entire year in that chamber only 1½ to 3 inches deep, as a developing embryo
within an egg and a fully formed turtle out of its eggshell waiting to dig
forth and take up that critical nest-to-water journey.
Remarkably resistant to death by bleeding and to infection, turtles can have
legs chewed off, and then heal and go on for years. Wood turtles in particular
can survive the loss of limbs to predators such as otters, living for years
after losing even both front legs. Recent research has indicated that female
spotted turtles can live 110 years. These survival traits are unparalleled in
the vertebrate kingdom.
But these marvels of biological adaptation do not sum up "turtle"
in human consciousness.
A sharp decline
Certainly I was not aware of these characteristics or much of anything else
related to this natural history when, as a solitary 8-year-old boy wandering a
wetland for the first time, I had my first, and for me literally life-changing,
encounter with a free-living spotted turtle in a wild swamp. In the long and
ongoing "turtle man"aspect of my life (its principal aspect, I'd
say), I have met an extraordinary number of people who have a turtle
connection. The turtle's role in prehistoric to contemporary human culture,
from Chinese to Native American, is well known.
It is ironic, and not a favorable reflection on human land-use policies,
that such an ancient and durable survivor-group has come to include in its
ranks so many that have declined to the point of receiving designations ranging
from "special concern" to "endangered." This forlorn
terminology that has come to be applied to them throughout their ranges has
arisen from the sharp decline of the species in question from formerly robust
populations.
Here in
This is a de facto designation, as there are no state-listed turtles here,
although the Nongame and Endangered Species Program of the state Fish and Game
Department has adopted regulations that prohibit taking these species from the
wild or possessing them. Unfortunately, habitat protection remains unaddressed.
Spotted, Blanding's and wood turtles are species of broad, contiguous
ecosystems. They require an integrated landscape, an extensive mosaic of
wetland, riparian and upland habitats. They must have cover and habitat
complexity. Human land use patterns of the day have relentlessly driven the
landscape in the direction of ecological simplicity.
To picture the difference between complexity and simplicity in this sense,
compare and contrast wild, untrammeled, natural-flood-managed floodplains (if
you can find them) to golf courses, agricultural fields, lawns, parking lots,
roadways, shopping malls and housing developments.
These turtles species of special concern are not
alone in their landscape requirements. Biodiversity itself has the same suite
of requisites. And ultimately, so does the human species.
"In wilderness is the preservation of the world" may be Thoreau's
most familiar statement. We need the wildness, the wild beauty Thoreau and so
many other eloquent voices have spoken of. It is a vital component of the
spirit and stardust of which we are composed.
Our menace, too
Turtles cannot run, jump or fly. They are literally grounded to the water,
mud and sand; earth, stones and plants of their landscapes. They are marvelous
and simply beautiful reminders that Earth is a theater for life in the
universe, as far as we yet know the only such theater in incomprehensible
dimensions of space and time. And if there are other places with forms of life,
they reduce any human word for "rare" to utter meaningless and do not
relieve us of our responsibility to the life of which we are an integral part
(though we too easily forget it) and of which we are a product (though some
would deny it).
The declining status of these ancient living symbols of a whole Earth is one
of those all-too-ignored beacons that tell us we cannot continue in the
arrogant ways by which we have allowed ourselves to overpopulate the Earth, to
alter the very terms of existence for life on Earth and to inflict our
unsustainable numbers, needs and desires on all living things.
Ethics and esthetics must be allowed into the land-use and land-preservation
debate. The pervasive and monumentally out-of-balance limitation of this debate
to self-serving human economics menaces turtles and humans alike.
(David Carroll lives in Warner.)