Her College Legacy: Friend to the Bog Turtle: Research Skills Will Help Conservation

By Kathryn Thier, The Charlotte Observer, N.C.

May 18–When Davidson College senior Shannon Pittman heads to graduate school in Missouri next year, she’ll take some of a Gaston County bog with her.

She had always planned to major in biology, but she credits research opportunities in the college’s herpetology lab with refining her career aspirations.

“It made me realize I was really interested in conservation biology,” said Pittman, 22, who will graduate today.

Since the spring of her freshman year, she’s worked on several research projects, taking the lead on many of them, said Mike Dorcas, associate biology professor and director of the lab.

“For somebody who’s just finishing her undergraduate degree, she’s done an amazing amount of work,” he said. “In a lot of ways now, she’s essentially functioning as a mid-level Ph.D. student.”

For the past year, for her honors project, Pittman has studied threatened bog turtles in Gaston County, monitoring their habits and survival rates. Adult bog turtles are about 5-6 inches long and weigh about 2.5 ounces. But not a lot of good habitat remains, she said. As land develops in the Charlotte region, it leaves less undisturbed areas for many wildlife species to thrive.

The state and federal governments consider bog turtles threatened. At the Gaston County bog, there were 40 adult bog turtles in the 1990s. Now the population is down to about 10 adults.

Her data will help the Catawba Lands Conservancy, which holds a conservation easement on the study site, manage the bog and surrounding area to better protect the tiny turtles.

“Thanks to her study, we found out … they do move around,” said Sharon Wilson, the conservancy’s land stewardship director. “We had been really focused on the bog but now we realize, not only do we need to focus on the bog, but there’s some creek there that might be important to them.”

The conservancy restored the bog, which had become overgrown and dried out, last year.

Those involved with the bog project asked that the Observer not disclose its exact location because people removing the turtles from the wild and selling them as pets is one of the biggest threats to the species.

Pittman used radio trackers and temperature monitors to track the turtles’ movements and activity patterns in the improved habitat. She taught herself a computer program so she could use her data to model the animals’ population dynamics.

By the end of the summer, the Enterprise, Ala., native will have five to six research papers published in scientific journals.

“I didn’t publish that many until I was a post-doc,” Dorcas said. At Missouri, she’ll focus on research that could help protect amphibian populations. With that degree, she hopes to teach at the college level and perhaps inspire future students to protect biodiversity.

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