Pintler
Road to Mortality
Keegan
Western Pond Turtle Conservation
Resource: Western Pond Turtles
The Western Pond Turtles (WPT) live up to 50 years. It takes 10 years for females to be able to lay eggs. Females can only lay six to 10 eggs a year. If they only lay that many their numbers could be severely diminished if predators ate the eggs or the turtles.
The biggest threat to the WPT are bullfrogs and warm water fish because they both eat the baby turtles. The solution is that we can protect the eggs and the babies. The Woodland Park Zoo, the Center for Wildlife Conservation and the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife work together to help the WPT. The females are followed to their nests then when they get to the nest they protect it by building screened cages. When the babies are hatched they get taken to the Woodland Park Zoo where they are kept warm and fed. The babies are allowed to get bigger so the bullfrogs can't eat them when they are released the next summer.
This WPT project gets their money from federal grants and contributions and a lot of volunteers.
Baylen
What can we do to save the Western pond turtle?
Western pond turtles are in danger! Before we can help them we have to find out what they do first!
About the Western pond turtles:
Western pond turtles are freshwater turtles. Western pond turtles live in lakes, ponds and streams. Western pond turtles eat aquatic plants, aquatic insects, small fish, worms and a few more.
How can we help the Western pond turtles:
The Western pond turtles are currently endangered by many things but this google document is going to focus on the habitat endangerment. The Western pond turtles are endangered from losing their habitat! Western pond turtles rest in ponds, streams, lakes and land near those. Some things like predators, humans and other stuff pollute, shrink or destroy the Western pond turtles habitats! One of the things that destroy the Western pond turtles habitats are humans!
Humans can dump horrible things into their habitats. People also build on these habitats or build roads across from their nesting grounds which leads into more problems.
How to save the Western pond turtles!:
One thing we could do is too mark or place areas where Western pond turtles live or commonly cross to say don’t build here Western pond turtles live or cross here. Another one is to reduce or stop predators from coming in contact with the Western pond turtles. This can be achieved via building a lot of fences around the area. Each one could be about 200 by 200 feet long. (This could go up to 400 by 400.) We can fill these areas with water,food and much more! This would be very costly. This would also keep the predators out.
Sources:
Information about the western pond turtle. (contains the information from the first paragraph of this.)
https://oregonwild.org/wildlife/western-pond-turtle
Accessed 12/12/2020
Shows a way for protection (not listed here)
https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/species/reptiles/western_pond_turtles/index.html Accessed 12/12/2020
On the 5th MAIN paragraph it shows habitat. My work gets a bit similar to this but is changed to the best of my ability.
https://www.dnr.wa.gov/Publications/em_fs13_012.pdf Accessed 12/12/2020
Dear the mayor of Ridgefield,
I know you might be busy, but I want your help with something. I know there is a lot of animals going excited but there’s a turtle called western pond turtle. There’s a lot of ways there going excited but. We are going to going to talk about one of the things that are going mostly making them go excited at least I think. They are getting eaten when they are babies. By the predators so the family tree gets affected by a lot and the turtles are so small. They range about the size of a dime. They live in Washington and Oregon.
Here are some ways to stop the turtles from going extinct #1 try to keep them away from the predators.#2 way Maybe try to make them bigger but that is probably not going to work. #3 way try to make hand made pond’s to make them deeper cause they are shy and when they know something is going for them they will dive in the water so maybe try to make it deeper. Now three ways that the threat is threatening them they are getting eaten as babies like I said in the beginning. #2 is the predators are getting them in water too fast. #3 They are also dying from competitors because they are small so they need small food so the bigger animals are eating the pond turtles animals.
Please can you help us save the pond turtles? -Kaleb R.