Diamondback terrapins are ambassador species for Meadowlands: video
Diamondback terrapins are a cornerstone to the balance of nature in the Meadowlands. Learn about the story of these turtles in this video
The diamondback terrapin is the only North American turtle species that lives exclusively in brackish waters.Thousands of terrapins thrive in New Jersey’s Hackensack River, a habitat they could occupy only after a dam made the water brackish.Motorists should be cautious during nesting season, from May to July, as female turtles cross roads to lay eggs.
China has its giant pandas and Australia its kangaroos. In New Jersey, the charismatic diamondback terrapin proudly inhabits its brackish waterways.
It is the only species of turtle in North America that exclusively lives in brackish waters, making the once freshwater basin of the Hackensack River an unlikely home.
“No one is going to look at a terrapin and not instantly love it,” said Drew McQuade, a senior biologist with the Meadowlands Research and Restoration Institute.
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The institute, said McQuade, who heads its terrapin research, has captured, marked and recaptured more than 1,700 of the turtles. He said every week in the summer months, he’s collecting turtles in the New Jersey Meadowlands.
“In urban areas in the Northeast, space is at a premium; there’s not a lot of vacant or undeveloped land for these guys. Despite that, they’ve been doing great. We have turtles that we know are at least, bare minimum, 18 to 19 years old,” McQuade said.
There are estimated to be more than 5,000 terrapin turtles in McQuade’s survey area, and as many as 15,000 in the entire Hackensack River, he said.
The Hackensack River, he said, presents a unique home for this specific type of turtle. Before the installation of the Oradell dam, the river was a freshwater system, and thus the terrapins would not have been able to survive there.
Terrapin turtles are not known to travel, and they live in relatively proximity to where they were born. The terrapins began to be spotted in the Meadowlands in the 1970s, but it is unknown if they were introduced into the environment through human intervention or through a natural migration.
“We really don’t know where they came from,” McQuade said.
The best time to see the diamondback terrapins is during their nesting season, which runs from May to mid-July, with peak time in June, when the females leave the salt marshes for the bays to lay eggs in the sandy spots above the high tide line. They will cross the roads to find nesting areas, so motorists should be on the lookout in those areas. High tides during full or new moon cycles tend to bring the terrapins out.
Each turtle that McQuade and his team capture is injected with a passive integrated transponder, or PIT tag. They behave similarly to a chip for tracking a pet, giving scientists the ability to perform long-term research without the constraints of battery life. The tag is not GPS-enabled but will stay with the turtle for the rest of its life and facilitate various statistics around the population size, survivorship and whether new turtles are coming in.
During the winter, the turtles burrow into the mud and brumate, a type of hibernation in which they slow their metabolism and conserve their energy during the colder months.
The turtles can be seen in the summer months throughout the Hackensack River, swimming around, poking their heads out of the water and, at low tide, sunning on the rocks.
In the Meadowlands, the turtles join the more than 200 bird species and dozens of mammals that live and hunt in the 30-square-mile open space in highly urbanized North Jersey.
The New Jersey Meadowlands offer a unique and dynamic home for these species as they survive despite the anthropogenic constraints.
“A great ambassador species,” McQuade called the terrapins. Despite everything they have been forced to overcome, they adapted to thrive in the middle of America’s largest metropolitan area.