The secret to saving sea turtles

I recently read this statement in a book: "We no longer have the luxury of eating sea turtles and their eggs, of making jewelry out of their shells and leather out of their skin." According to the author, too many humans populate the earth for sea turtles to ever again be harvested in a sustainable fashion.

The plight of the seven species of sea turtles alive in the world today is set forth by James R. Spotila in a 216-page book, "Saving Sea Turtles" (2011, Johns Hopkins University Press). The book's subtitle is "Extraordinary Stories from the Battle against Extinction." Spotila provides accounts of various environmental threats sea turtles have faced. Myriad problems that threaten the very survival of individual turtles and some species can be attributed to humans, including poachers, developers and politicians. Many of Spotila's stories relate how other humans, including conservation biologists, sea turtle ecologists and politicians, have intervened to save these magnificent creatures of the sea from destruction.

Spotila writes in an easy, highly readable style, without the flowery emotional flourishes that some sea turtle enthusiasts resort to. He lets the facts tell the story. The book is well organized, with the first chapter addressing the status of sea turtles in the modern world and pointing out the contemporary problems they face. He identifies the challenge that every sea turtle faces from the outset--to successfully hatch from an egg laid on a beach. In one part of the first chapter he focuses on turtle egg poachers. He refers to the poachers as people with "an undersized heart." Poachers will steal eggs right out of a nest on the beach where a turtle biologist is doing a study. This practice is no longer an "I need food for my family" operation; it is commerce. For example, the author caught a poacher one night in Costa Rica with almost 500 sea turtle eggs. "Guess he had a big family," Spotila says.


The second chapter, "Life in the Egg: Buried Alive under Two Feet of Sand," goes through the vital steps of how an embryo develops within the egg until it hatches. The book explains the importance of temperature in determining the sex of a baby turtle and what besides small-hearted poachers are threats to nests. The remaining chapters are in life cycle order, from hatchlings racing to the sea, to life as a juvenile turtle, to the adult female returning to a beach to nest.

Much of the book uses examples of leatherback sea turtles, the largest turtles in the world and the species Jim Spotila has fought tirelessly to save from annihilation. These giants are so large that if one were stood on end in a normal-size room, the turtle's head would poke through the ceiling. These enormous turtles have been known to travel into the ice-cold waters of polar seas, indicating that they can survive at least short periods of freezing weather. They may then travel to the equator and nest on a tropical beach. The hazards they face - from an egg on a beach where people and predators roam, to a hatchling swimming past sharks in an ocean, to a nesting female trying to find a safe beach to crawl onto - are many. But the primary threat to all sea turtles are not natural conditions around the world that the species have successfully navigated through for millions of years. The principal threat comes from people, as detailed many times in this book.

The stories capture the essence of how dedicated people must be involved to carry out a sustainable effort to conserve this identifiable group of species. By writing a book about what is involved in saving sea turtles, Jim Spotila has augmented his own already substantial efforts by helping keep the conservation process alive. Sea turtles may never be a sustainable resource that can be harvested, but the author shows that with the right attitudes we can at least ensure they will be around for us to enjoy for decades to come.

What do we know about Pirate Perches?

Jack Sparrow is certainly the most unusual pirate on the scene these days, but I recently encountered a different sort of pirate with its own intrigue. I caught two little fish in a flooded area of some nearby woods and recognized them as pirate perch. Knowing the name of a plant or animal is the first step in identifying it; knowing someone who can tell you about its lifestyle, its behavior and other interesting facts is the next step.

I caught the fish in a minnow trap, a small wire mesh cylinder with inward-pointing funnels at both ends. My grandson and I had placed some in a shallow woodland pool alongside a swampy area. We also caught other captivating creatures, including leopard frog tadpoles and some seldom-seen aquatic salamanders called sirens. We brought the fish home in a plastic sandwich bag filled with swamp water and I took them to a colleague who is an ichthyologist to confirm their identity and to find out more about their biology. Dean Fletcher, a research scientist at the University of Georgia's Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, probably knows more about pirate perches than any other living person, whether angler or fisheries biologist. The coauthor of a book on freshwater fishes, he has written one of the few modern scientific papers on pirate perches.

The pirate perch, a freshwater fish but not a true perch, is the only living species in its family. It is common and widely distributed along the Atlantic and Gulf coastal plains and up the Mississippi River Valley to the Great Lakes. But most people, even seasoned anglers, are not likely to see one. Adults are usually less than 4 inches long and are primarily nocturnal. In addition, not many people fish in small tributary streams, in weedy waters thick with root masses or in the floodplain swamps of larger rivers.


A bizarre biological trait of pirate perches involves the adult anatomy. As with other fishes, reproductive products (eggs and sperm) and body wastes are released through the vent, which is usually situated under the body near the tail. The vent is in this location in juvenile pirate perches. But as a pirate perch approaches adulthood, something strange happens. The opening gradually migrates along the underside of the fish until it is positioned under the throat, just behind the gills.

Fish biologists have speculated on the function of this odd placement of the vent since it was first described in 1824. As the scientific paper by Dean Fletcher and his colleagues says, "We solve[d] the conundrum through a combination of intensive field investigations, underwater filming, and molecular parentage analysis." In other words they studied the fish extensively in its murky habitat, filmed its behavior and used DNA analyses to see who the parents were of various offspring. Their discoveries were made in the cool waters of late winter and early spring when pirate perch begin spawning.

Through the use of modern technology, laboratory genetics and plain old-fashioned behavioral observations in the field, the scientists revealed why a fish would have a vent located in the front of the body instead of toward the back. They documented for the first time that the female actually thrusts her head into a tangled root mass and lays her eggs, a behavior unconfirmed for any other North American fish. The male quickly follows suit, putting his head into the same opening in the roots and depositing sperm to fertilize the eggs. The DNA analyses confirmed that particular offspring indeed had the parents predicted based on the mating observations.

My grandson and I released the two fish we had caught, still in good condition, back into their wetland home. Let's hope they find the right root masses to produce their young, leading to future generations of this unusual little fish. And why are they called "pirate" perch? If you put one in your home aquarium, it will apparently have no qualms about attacking smaller fish--to eat them, of course, not to take their money and jewels.

Looking at walls can be environmentally interesting

Aside from the mountains, any place within 300 miles of where I live reached temperatures approaching 100 degrees last week. During such hot weather, nature-watching can be disappointing at midday. Birds are less active. Turtles stop basking on logs. Lizards retreat to shady out-of-sight spots. Amphibians have gone underground. While contemplating that truth, I remembered a long-ago column about a habitat that will always yield some life to observe.

The habitat is in my backyard and everyone's neighborhood. It is a habitat we see daily but seldom think of in ecological terms. I am referring to walls. Yes, walls. Like the sides of houses and sheds or a fence around a garden. Walls make up a significant portion of the world's terrestrial habitats. Arnold Darlington, in his 1981 book titled "Ecology of Walls," claims that walls comprise more than 10 percent of the area habitable by plants and animals in a city.

Many factors affect the extent and composition of species inhabiting walls, including the degree of inclination. Horizontal walls have shelf space and are more likely to collect dirt and debris where seeds can root. Compass direction could matter for some species. Moss is more likely to grow on the shadiest side of a wall. The material, porosity, and composition of the wall, the climate of the region, and the history of human alteration are also major influences on what is found living on a particular wall.


One influential factor determining the vegetative character is the age of the wall itself. Algae and lichens are usually the first pioneers to become established. According to Darlington, vines rooted at the base produce the best "mural" vegetation on walls that are more than 150 years old, such as at the Ivy League schools. When walls get several centuries old and are left unattended, as with 2000 year old walls built by the Romans in many parts of Europe, they become badly decomposed. Then shrubs and trees are more likely to grow from the wall ruins. Once a wall has structure in the form of vines or other plants, or as a result of crevices, animals begin to take up residence.

The ecological perspective of walls offers some new and intriguing prospects. School projects come to mind. I once suggested that wall ecology would make ideal science fair projects. The hypothesis would relate to biodiversity and be stated something like: plants and animals will live on any available space if given enough time, even on a vertical wall. Included would be fences, concrete incinerators, and even the sides of trees, which are natural walls. Questions can be posed and answered. Do wood, brick and concrete walls in an area differ in the number and kinds of plant and animal inhabitants? Does a shaded wall have more organisms than a sunny wall? How important are the wall's age, height or position relative to ground vegetation in determining what grows on the wall?

One feature of a science fair project involving the ecology of walls that will appeal to some students is that there will be plenty of time to procrastinate. A wall ecology project could be completed one or two weeks before it is due, maybe in a day under desperate conditions. But imagine the data set a student who starts now could accumulate through summer and into fall to make the point that walls are important to the biodiversity of an area.

Examining walls around your home can even be a way to entertain yourself or children by observing the world from a different perspective. See how many different kinds of plants and animals you can find on walls in your neighborhood. It was too hot during my wall search last week to expect to find animals, but upon reflection, I realized some of my previous observations of lizards and snakes crawling, bats and treefrogs sleeping, and birds building nests had been activities that occurred on some sort of wall. Walls are much more interesting ecologically than most people would think.

Do Giant Salamanders Really Exist?

By my calculation, if all the salamanders Tom Luhring caught during his research project for his master's degree from the University of Georgia were laid end to end, they would be longer than three football fields. That has to be a world record. 

Tom, who is now a doctoral student at the University of Missouri, conducted his research at the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory in South Carolina on a group of amphibians known as the giant salamanders. These secretive creatures inhabit swamps and lowlands, spending their entire lives in the mud and waters of places where few people ever go. His studies of one species, the greater siren, have revealed more about their population ecology, movement patterns and behavior than had ever been known before. The species, which has been known to science for more than two centuries, is one of the heaviest salamanders in the Western Hemisphere. Yet little was known of certain aspects of its biology before Tom's research.

The largest salamanders in North America are aquatic species that live in the East. The greater siren reaches lengths of more than three feet. Another giant salamander of the Southeast, the amphiuma, has a record length of almost four feet. Like sirens, amphiumas are seldom seen by people despite their large size. That their scientific name (Amphiuma) is used as their common name in most places is indicative of their rarity, although they are called lamper eels or Congo eels in some regions.

Two other salamanders, the hellbender and the mudpuppy, or waterdog, also qualify as giants, although neither gets as long as the biggest amphiumas and sirens. The mudpuppy, reaching a length of a foot and a half, is primarily a northern species, found in lakes, ponds and rivers. Hellbenders are bulky creatures that can reach two and half feet long. They live in cold mountain streams and rivers from Alabama to New York. The world's largest salamander, from Japan, is closely related to the hellbender; it can be more than five feet long.

Sirens and amphiumas, despite their enormous size relative to other amphibians, have minuscule legs with toes. An amphiuma more than a yard in length will have legs less than an inch long and no thicker than a toothpick. Amphiumas and sirens are short-legged, dark-colored, slippery creatures, but distinguishing one from the other is easy: sirens have only two of the seemingly useless legs, whereas amphiumas have four. In addition, sirens have external, visible gills; amphiumas have an opening alongside the head that leads to internal gills.

Sirens and amphiumas are slimy animals that seldom leave the water; they would soon dehydrate if left on dry ground. But both live in aquatic habitats that can dry up completely during long-term droughts. What do great big water-dwelling salamanders do then? First, as their lake home dries up, they burrow into the remaining mud. Then they secrete a slimy body covering, which hardens into a cocoon that can keep them moist for a few months to more than a year. When the rains return and the cocoon is exposed to water, the siren or amphiuma emerges to begin feeding on aquatic insects and other invertebrates that have also survived the drought.

Sirens and amphiumas kept in aquariums as pets have been known to live for decades, but no one knows how long they can live in the wild. Their courtship and mating behavior are also still a mystery, even for specimens kept in captivity. Amphibian biologists are not sure how closely related sirens are to other salamanders, and some even argue that sirens are not salamanders at all, but some other type of amphibian. 

America's giant salamanders bring to the fore two ecological insights. One, scientists know relatively little about the biology of some of the largest animals in our midst, which means we still have much to learn about the world around us. Second is the realization that some of our local creatures are as fascinating in their own way as any exotic species with a starring role in a nature show.