The Beginning

Alright, so here is the current deal. We have a small population of Western Pond Turtles that live in a small (.25 acre) reservoir here in the foothills of California. These guys are pretty isolated from other turtle populations due to the altering of water sources and the sheer distances between the few stock ponds and reservoirs in the area. In our case, the small pond where our turts live dries up almost every year in late summer. So we were curious, where do the little boogers go? Most of the research on these guys has focused on river systems where water is consistently available, so I had to wonder. What's up with our guys?

The lowdown? in 2007 I (Kat) started a project eliminating non-native bullfrogs from the few water bodies on the 4500 acre range where I am fortunate to work. In the reservoir where the turts are, I noticed that there was an enormous (both in numbers and size - we pulled a 5 lb frog out of there) population of bullfrogs and that all the turts present were adults, at least 12 years old (going by scute rings). And I wondered. If bullfrogs are known to eat anything that fits in their mouth, and food is scarce around here, and a hatchling baby turtle is just about bite-sized for an adult bullfrog, and it's kind of suspicious....... So I began taking out the frogs. I annihilated the entire adult population in one season and then a drought was nice enough to dry up the reservoir - killing any bullfrog tadpoles left. Soooooooo. Yep - you guessed it. The very next season, we had baby turtles. This got me thinking. Is it enough to eliminate bullfrogs? How are these guys surviving if they have no outside gene flow since their introduction in the 1930's? And where they heck do they nest in such a harsh system? Thus we began.....