Blanding's Turtle

Fascinating facts about the Blanding's Turtle

• Blanding's turtles, showing almost no signs of getting old. They stay active and can still lay eggs into their eighth or ninth decade of life, a rarity among reptiles. In the wild they live at least 70 years and can reach up to 77. This negligible senescence.
• These turtles wait a long time before joining the breeding crowd. Females need 14-20 years to reach sexual maturity, with most maturing around 18 years, while males can be ready by about 12 years. Once mature, females lay an average of eight eggs in New York, but clutch sizes can range from three to 19 elsewhere, averaging around ten.
• When it's nesting time, a female Blanding's turtle can trek farther than a marathon runner's lap. She may wander more than a kilometer from her winter hideout, and during the search for a safe spot she can travel up to 7.5 km, sometimes covering a 2-kilometer range of nests. Males are even more mobile, routinely moving over 10 km, while females usually travel over 2 km outside the nesting surge. This long-distance movement spreads genes across wetlands but also exposes turtles to road mortality.
• Habitat loss and nest predators are the biggest threats to Blanding's turtles, pushing them onto the IUCN Red List as endangered and onto CITES Appendix II, which regulates international trade. In the U.S. they lack federal protection, yet are listed as endangered in seven states and threatened in others; Canada lists the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence population as federally threatened.

Sources

Every fact above was checked against these pages, and kept only where one of them states it.

• Wikipedia

At a glance

About the Blanding's Turtle

In the serene wetlands of North America, the Blanding's turtle glides effortlessly, its yellow-throated head bobbing gently as it navigates the aquatic landscape with a quiet confidence. With a shell adorned in vibrant yellow stripes, this endangered creature moves through the world with a slow and deliberate pace, its ancient eyes taking in the surroundings with a wisdom born of centuries. As it disappears beneath the water's surface, the Blanding's turtle leaves behind a fleeting glimpse of a life lived in harmony with the fragile ecosystem it calls home.

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