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Exclusives:Features August
7, 2001: By Jim Merritt '66
Wood's suspicious behavior
occurs on June nights on causeways leading to Stone Harbor and other
seaside resorts in Cape May County, New Jersey, where he can be
found hunched over the carcasses of diamondback turtles, looking
for signs of life. Diamondbacks live in the salt marsh, and June
and early July is when the females crawl onto high ground to lay
their eggs. Many wind up on roadways and are crushed by cars. In 1989, Wood launched
a project to rescue diamondbacks during their six-week nesting season.
Now the causeways have "Turtle X-ing" signs and are patrolled by
volunteers. Sometimes they find a turtle upended, with just minor
injuries -- grazed by a car's tire and flipped, or "tiddlywinked,"
as Wood puts it. Even if her shell is broken, a turtle may survive
with a little help from her friends, who may literally wire her
back together until the wound heals. If the wound is fatal the eggs
can often be extracted and incubated. Turtle Central is the
Wetlands Institute, a research station in Stone Harbor. Wood is
its director of research, and during the summer he oversees college
interns studying coastal ecology (the rest of the year he teaches
at Richard Stockton College, in Pomona, New Jersey, near Atlantic
City). Interns help with the Turtle Rescue Project, and during the
height of nesting season the place is part emergency room, nursery,
and rehab center for local diamondbacks. In one room, thumbnail-sized
turtle eggs, arrayed in neat rows in a plastic container, bask under
an incubation light. "We took these from a road kill," said Wood.
"They start out a translucent pink, and if they turn chalky white
like most of these it's a good sign -- it means they're fertile."
The incubating temperature is kept at 86 degrees Fahrenheit, which
for reasons not well understood produces females; lower the temperature
by six degrees and you get mostly males. The eggs will hatch in
six to eight weeks. The young will then pass the winter being fed
and cared for at the "Turtle Farm" at Stockton College, until reaching
what Wood calls a "relatively predator-proof" length of two to three
inches. Come spring, kids recruited from local elementary and grade
schools will help return them to the wild. At another container,
Wood checks on a half dozen inch-long hatchlings. They seem equally
curious about him. "This is our Head Start Program. They're looking
at me like that because to them I'm the refrigerator, and they think
I'm going to feed them. This year's group is kind of a runty because
we can't import the turtle feed we normally use. It's by far the
best food for captive turtles, but it contains ground-up cow bones
and has been banned because of concern about mad-cow disease. Notice
the variation in shell patterns and colors, from yellowish green
to gray and almost black -- that's very unusual for turtles but
typical of diamondbacks. They're a very attractive species, and
there's a certain aesthetic pleasure I get in working with them." On the floor, an adult
female with a cracked and bloodied carapace claws listlessly at
the sides of the cardboard box in which she's been placed. Wood
lifts her up and inserts a finger in the soft flesh near her tail.
He doubts she will survive, but his digital inspection reveals she's
gravid. "This one's a candidate for what we call an eggoctomy." Digging fossil turtles Wood's professional fascination
with turtles goes back almost 40 years. At Princeton he majored
in geology and wrote his senior thesis on fossil mammals under Professor
Glen Jepsen '27, but as a graduate student at Harvard he switched
to fossil turtles. On a dig in Venezuela in the 1970s he unearthed
the biggest turtle known to science, a freshwater behemoth from
the Age of Dinosaurs with a shell more than eight feet long. Its
skeleton is on display at Harvard's Agassiz Museum, and replicas
of it can be found at New York's American Museum of Natural History
and several other venues around the country. Wood inherited an interest
in natural history from his father, Albert Wood '30, an emeritus
professor of biology at Amherst College. (The senior Wood, who is
93, lives in Cape May Court House, a few miles from the Wetlands
Institute, where he regularly attends presentations by visiting
scientists. In June, accompanied by his son, he drove up to Princeton
for his 71st reunion and rode with the Old Guard in the P-rade.) Roger Wood has been studying
diamondbacks and writing about them for scientific journals since
the early 1970s, not long after he arrived at Stockton, and much
of what we know about the species comes from his research. In the
early days he collaborated with an octogenarian waterman named Earl
Yearicks, who caught diamondbacks and sold them to a seafood wholesaler,
who in turn sold them live to venerable restaurants like Bookbinder's,
in Philadelphia, for rendering into terrapin soup. Before the turtles
were shipped off, Wood would collect baseline data on sex, size,
and distinctive markings. "Mr. Yearicks never got past sixth grade,"
recalls Wood, "and I was pleased that he let me to list him as coauthor
of the first paper I wrote on diamondbacks." The diamondback turtle
or terrapin, Malaclemys terrapin, lives in brackish coastal waters
from Massachusetts to Texas. Of the world's approximately 270 turtle
species, it is the only one adapted to a salt-marsh environment.
Females, which grow to a length of six to nine inches (males top
out at five inches), typically lay a clutch of eight to 12 eggs
in a chamber five to six inches deep scooped out by their hind legs.
The diamondback's jaws are made for feeding on a variety of small
mussels, clams, and snails. They will also eat small fish and are
especially fond of fiddler crabs. In the winter they hibernate,
either burying themselves in mud or lying in a dormant state on
the bottom of marsh creeks. Epicurean delight In Colonial times, diamondbacks
were abundant and a routine part of the diet of tidewater settlers.
Wood cites an account of slaves going on a hunger strike until promised
something else to eat (in similar stories about stipulations in
the contracts of indentured servants, the offending fare is lobster,
salmon, or shad). After terrapin soup became a staple of gourmet
restaurants in the late 19th century, unregulated commercial hunting
drove the species to the brink of extinction. As Wood wrote in a
scientific paper, epicures "considered diamondbacks to be the ultimate
treat for cultured palates. Pound for pound, diamondbacks were unquestionably
the most expensive meat in the world" -- on the market, a dozen
prime females could fetch $125. He believes the species was saved
in part by the coming of Prohibition, which made sherry, the other
key ingredient in terrapin soup, unavailable, and by a further reduction
in demand brought on by the Great Depression. "My dad was born and
raised here in Cape May County," said Wood. "As a boy he spent a
lot of time sailing in the bays, and he can't recall ever seeing
a terrapin. When I was a kid spending summers here in the '40s and
'50s I didn't see them, either. We didn't really start noticing
them until the 1960s. I think they had been coming back for a while,
but during the early decades of their recovery they stayed out of
sight because there were still plenty of natural nesting areas on
the back dunes of barrier islands. By the '60s and '70s turtle numbers
were back up, but by then the shore towns were pretty well developed,
and the bulldozing and bulkheading of nesting sites forced them
up onto the causeways." And into the paths of
motorists hell-bent for the beach. On average, some 500 diamondbacks
are crunched by cars in Cape May County each year, and throughout
the turtle's range fatalities number in the many thousands. Even
more may drown in commercial crab traps -- Wood lobbies for laws
requiring traps fitted with turtle excluders; New Jersey and Maryland
(where it is the state reptile) now require them, and he hopes other
states will follow suit. Habitat destruction also remains a threat
as the diamondback's natural breeding areas continue to succumb
to development. Replacements don't add
up to the numbers squashed, and the turtles may be headed for another
population crash. Still, Wood continues to hope -- partially off-setting
the loss of natural habitat, new breeding areas have been created
by the pumping of dredge sands onto march islands -- and to do what
he can to make people aware of the diamondback's plight. His advice
to shore-bound drivers: "When you see a turtle crossing the road,
slow down, stop, pick her up, cross her in the direction she was
traveling, and wish her good luck." For more on the Terrapin
Rescue Project, a joint undertaking of the Wetlands Institute and
Richard Stockton College, visit the Web site www.wetlandsinstitute.org
or call 609-368-1211.
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Roger
Wood '62, a mild-mannered zoology professor who hardly fits a criminal
profile, is used to explaining himself to police officers at two
o'clock in the morning. "The story I tell them sounds so crazy they
figure it's got to be true," he says. "No one's ever given me a
sobriety test."