Reptile roundup
Turtle-sniffing dogs aiding zoo researchers
ST. LOUIS — The three-toed box turtles, Missouri’s state reptile, crawled and rested somewhere in the woods and under the brush.
The pack of floppy-eared, chocolate brown Boykin spaniels, all the way from central Montana, wriggled and snuffled inside kennels in a white Ford box van, ready to find the turtles for St. Louis Zoo researchers.
“They’re just going to jump out, and they’re probably going to jump all over everybody,” warned their human, John Rucker, standing at the van’s door. “They’re extremely friendly.”
One by one, the dogs — Skeeter, Scamp, Ruger, Yogi and Lazarus — scurried out of the van, jumping up on researchers and wriggling around in the grass. “You want to find turtles? I want turtles,” Rucker said. A dog let out a bark, and Rucker chuckled.
The researchers with the St. Louis Zoo’s Institute for Conservation Medicine wanted to find turtles, too. They’re at the zoo’s WildCare Park, 425 acres in north St. Louis County the zoo will eventually turn into a breeding and research facility and tourist attraction.
They’re doing a series of biodiversity studies on the property, which means they are setting up cameras, hiking through the woods and yes, hiring turtle-sniffing dogs, to see who, exactly, lives on the land.
The turtle count is also part of the larger St. Louis Box Turtle Project, a nine-year effort to count and assess the two types of box turtles native to Missouri: threetoed box turtle and ornate box turtles. They’re tracking them at the WildCare Park, in Forest Park, Tyson Research Center in Eureka and the Little Creek Nature Area in Florissant.
They’re particularly concerned about a virus they’re seeing in amphibians and now in turtle populations, called ranavirus. The virus has wiped out 80% of some box turtle populations in the eastern part of the country, and they’re starting to see it here.
Some of the WildCare Park’s aquatic turtle population tested positive for it last summer but didn’t show symptoms such as snotty noses, gooey eyes and ulcers in the mouth. Someone brought in a box turtle sick with the virus to the Wildlife Rescue Center in Ballwin last summer. The turtle was treated for its symptoms but had to be euthanized.
Dr. Sharon Deem, the director of the institute, said they are working to see if the treated turtles are long-term carriers. “Are they infectious to others? They don’t wear masks very well,” she joked. “It’s the same kind of issue — you have a contagious pathogen that can be shared between species, and it can cause mortality in some species. I think all of us right now in the day of covid can relate to this. This is what happens to not just the human species.”
Rucker, 73, lives off the grid with his girlfriend outside Cascade, Mont. He’s a retired high school English teacher, “who is supposed to be having his restful golden years,” but instead travels the country four months a year with his turtle-tracking dogs.
He started doing this in 1998, after his Boykin spaniels happened to sniff out and fetch turtles. He now trains them to do so, first hiding black and yellow painted golf balls, then graduating to full-sized fiberglass turtle shells smeared with bacon grease.
“I would say that 80% of training is monkey see, monkey do,” he said. “The young puppies watch the old dogs, they copy that behavior. They’re working from scent, not sight.”
He works for conservation departments, the University of Illinois and the Potawatomi tribe in Michigan, where eastern box turtles are considered sacred.
The dogs are sniffing for turtle urine, which both male and females let out in trails to attract one another. But because of the unseasonably cool weather here this week, the turtles aren’t moving much.
On Wednesday, the researchers, Rucker, his dogs and a trail of media made their way through the brush, keeping their eyes to the ground. The turtles will hide under leaves and grass to stay warm, but they will also crawl out to open spaces to bask in the sun.
“Every turned-over leaf looks like a turtle to us,” said Jamie Palmer, a research technician at the institute. She later joked her phone photo album contained pictures of turtles, blood cells of turtles and “a few” of her children.
“We’ve been doing this for nine years, people. We’re like field dogs ourselves,” said Deem. “If you re the first one to see one, you’re going to be so excited.”
The researchers found two turtles earlier this week themselves by happenstance. The dogs were with them, but the humans found them. That’s how these things sometimes work — every pair of eyes count.
As the humans and dogs looked unsuccessfully in one patch of woods on Wednesday morning, in the afternoon they moved across a field to another patch of woods. As the group and dogs made their way up and down a ravine to a creek, a shout echoed from the edge of the woods: “Turtle!”
Billy Brennan, the zoo’s director of public relations and government affairs, had stood up in the woods to stretch his back and noticed something shiny on the ground. It was Missouri’s reptile ambassador, a three-toed box turtle. Brennan waited for the crew and dogs to come over, and Scamp sniffed the turtle out and picked it up it gently in his mouth. If the turtle was sick, it couldn’t transmit the virus to the dogs, researchers know.
They put the turtle into a canvas bag and walked it over to a tent. There, they measured and weighed it, swabbed its mouth and cloaca at the back end, notched the shell and used plumber’s putty to attach a radio antenna and temperature sensor to its shell. Like the other turtles in the study, they use this to find the turtles later, to measure its movements and monitor its health.
This particular turtle was “an old guy,” and his face and feet were crusted with mud, a sign that not long ago he had been walking in a creek or in brumation, a lighter version of hibernation. He looked healthy, but lab results will show if he has ranavirus. “This is a really tired turtle, because it is cold, and he’s not sticking his head out for us,” said Dr. Maris Brenn-White, a research fellow with the institute. He’s like, ‘Excuse you!’”