Shell shock turns into turtle rescue mission

HAMDEN — Quinnipiac University public safety Lt. Don DiStefano was walking to a meeting on campus when he ran into some unexpected visitors.

Tumbling down the steps in front of him, a crowd of students on their heels, was a group of baby snapping turtles.

It was move-in day that Thursday morning, and campus was bustling.

“We were walking up a pathway that leads to the front of the student affairs building, so right smack in the middle of the residential dorms, a very heavily trafficked pathway,” DiStefano said.

To keep them from being trampled, DiStefano and his colleague Brad Bopp asked the students to be careful and began collecting the turtles, DiStefano said. They found a box to temporarily hold the hatchlings, which were 1 to 2 inches long, according to DiStefano.

The officers quickly located a nest from which more hatchlings were emerging, he said.

In all, they collected 16 turtles and released them into a local body of water.

According to Mike Ravesi, a wildlife biologist for the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, the mother snapping turtle may have laid her eggs when campus was quieter, thinking it was a good area to nest.

Snapping turtles nest between May and July. When the eggs hatch — usually between late summer and early fall — the babies head toward water, he said.

But “the survival rate is really low in hatchlings,” he said. “It’s not unheard of for 90 percent of them to not survive.”

Major threats include predators such as raccoons and opossums, which eat both eggs and hatchlings, Ravesi said.

Further, hatchlings face human threats, including trampling and road mortality, according to Ravesi.

Road mortality also poses a significant risk to adult turtles, especially females who cross land to nest, according to the biologist.

“That’s a problem because that also removes the reproductive capability from that population . ... It takes turtles a really long time to reach maturity. It can take them 15-plus years” to be able to reproduce, he said. “The removal of even a single adult can have an impact, especially for smaller, imperiled populations.”