All posts tagged: turtle

Meet Earl Grey, the sea turtle with a wild family tree

Meet Earl Grey, the sea turtle with a wild family tree

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. A rare type of sea turtle is on the road to recover at the Georgia Sea Turtle Center in Jekyll Island, Georgia. But this reptile is the offspring of a surprising parent duo: a Kemp’s ridley sea turtle (Lepidochelys kempii) mother and a Loggerhead sea turtle father (Caretta caretta). That makes the sea turtle in question, named Earl Grey, a first-generation hybrid sea turtle.  Kemp ridleys are the world’s smallest and most endangered species of sea turtle, and they only nest in two locations in Texas and Mexico. The IUCN categorizes them as critically endangered. Loggerheads are the second largest hard-shelled sea turtle and are about 2.4- to 3.5-feet-long. They are significantly bigger than Kemp’s ridleys, and nest across multiple oceans.  In fact, Georgia Sea Turtle Center director Jaynie L. Gaskin tells Popular Science that the union of Earl Grey’s parents is interesting because the two species have notably different size, behavior, and nesting patterns. So what does that …

How to help a turtle cross the road

How to help a turtle cross the road

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. This time of year, new flowers and animals are everywhere. Baby birds and squirrels pop up in nests, while opossums and bunnies roam as the weather warms up. Not exactly known for their speed, turtles are also waking up from brumation—aka reptile hibernation.  Busy roads can be particularly dangerous for turtles, even with the protection from their hard shells. Every squished turtle is another that won’t help create the next generation, which is not welcome news for many already endangered turtle species. Out of 356 known turtle species, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists 161 of them as threatened.  If you spot a turtle trying to cross a road, it is important to follow some simple rules. Make sure that you are in a safe place to stop. You won’t be able to help a turtle if you get hurt. If driving, put on your hazard lights and slowly pull over onto the shoulder. Assess the …

Injured turtle gets a second chance on four wheels 

Injured turtle gets a second chance on four wheels 

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Installing wheels on a tortoise might seem like a cruel joke—but a veterinary practice in the Philippines recently did so to help out an Aldabra giant tortoise (Aldabrachelys gigantea) with troubled hind legs.  As the name suggests, Aldabra giant tortoises are among the largest land tortoises. Also referred to as the Aldabra tortoise or giant tortoise, this reptile can weigh up to 550 pounds and can live over 150 years. Interestingly, Charles Darwin, among others, worked to protect the species.  The tortoise in question lived at a private zoo, but its legs weren’t working properly. The zoo referred the case to Nielsen Donato, chief surgeon at Vets in Practice, a vet practice with seven locations in metro Manila. Donato and his team did X-rays on their large patient, but didn’t detect dislocations or fractures.  Wheeled tortoise “Mostly we think it could be weakness of the hind legs, could be neurological in origin,” Donato tells Popular Science. “Probably there were …

A 3D-printed wheelchair is helping this turtle walk again

A 3D-printed wheelchair is helping this turtle walk again

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. A Gulf Coast box turtle named Moses, missing both of its back legs, is getting a second chance at mobility thanks to a caring human and a 3D printer. Using the printer, an aquarist going by the Instagram handle jawscritters designed a custom-made wheelchair that supplements Moses’s movement. After fielding feedback from a community of makers on Reddit, jawscritters made several adjustments to the original design. Now, with the help of that online community, Moses is moving around better than before thanks to his pair of new wheels. Jawscritters has since shared the files for the design online, so anyone with a 3D printer can potentially help other turtles in need. “One of my coworkers asked if I could make something to help one of our ambassador box turtles with mobility,” Jawscritters notes in one of his posts. “Within 24 hours I had a plan to make a 3D printed wheelchair.”  Building a turtle wheelchair, one iteration at a …

The world’s smallest sea turtle lives in a noisy ocean

The world’s smallest sea turtle lives in a noisy ocean

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. For the world’s smallest sea turtles, life in the ocean is getting pretty noisy. These relatively little turtles (on average they’re still 75 to 100 pounds) mostly found in the Gulf of Mexico already face  fishing gear accidents, seacraft collisions, plastic pollution, and habitat deterioration, and now excess noise may be harming the critically endangered and rare  Kemp’s ridley sea turtles (Lepidochelys kempii).  We say might because even though these sea turtles share waters with extremely busy shipping lanes, scientists know very little about their underwater hearing. As such, a team of researchers set out to understand what, exactly, these animals can perceive in terms of sound. “Understanding hearing ability is a fundamental step in determining whether human-generated noise could affect a species,” Charles Muirhead, the co-author of the recent study published in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America and a researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Sensory Ecology and Bioacoustics Lab, tells Popular Science. “Our goal …