Through black-rimmed glasses, Brad Moxley looks at the artificial bog. He chuckles, “It’s hard to answer why my work is important. It’s dependent on your audience. From a scientist’s perspective, human beings are a very small, relatively unimportant, segment of everything. We are dealing with things that pre-date us by millions of years in most situations. I think it is our duty to protect these things. People want to protect old buildings and old cities. It seems to be a sort of innate feeling. I don’t see why people don’t feel that way with animals.”
Moxley is a herpetologist at the Knoxville Zoological Gardens. He studies reptiles and amphibians and works on conservation projects. One of his earliest memories is seeing a snake in the yard and trying to catch it. He’s always had animals in his life and reptiles have played the largest part. Moxley volunteered at the Zoo when he was thirteen and after college, he took a position with the Zoo and has been there since 2004. “With reptile people in general, you seldom hear somebody say they fell into it,” he says.
It’s humid and warm in the herpetology building, behind the scenes of the normal reptile exhibits. Wooden shelves with plastic trays are the first sight. Behind these shelves are more wooden shelves, plastic tubs, and metal containers. The tenants of these trays and shelves are some of the most endangered tortoises in the world.
The first tortoise Moxley points out is the Spider Tortoise, native to Madagascar. The Spider Tortoise is critically endangered, but has been successfully bred in captivity.
On the shelf below the Spider Tortoise is the Flat-Tailed Spider Tortoise, with the difference being fairly obvious in the name. The Knoxville Zoo was the first in the western hemisphere and the second in the world to have Flat-Tailed Spider Tortoises in captivity.
The next tortoise Moxley points out is in a wooden container. It’s the Burmese Star Tortoise, native to Myanmar. With a slightly solemn tone, Moxley admits the tortoise as a species isn’t doing well. It’s difficult to do research in Myanmar due to the government and military junta being hard to work with.
Moxley shows, what he calls, the “crown jewel” of the herpetology department next – the Ploughshare Tortoise. It is the most endangered animal that the Knoxville Zoo has currently. There are fewer than three hundred ploughshare tortoises in the wild.
Most of the tortoises are endangered due to habitat destruction and poaching. According to Moxley, a meteor hit Madagascar millions of years ago, depositing rare metals into the earth. Companies around the world are buying property in Madagascar and mine to find the metals, which help power cellphones, cars, and most other electronics. This mining destroys the tortoises’ habitats.
Closer to home, a turtle faces the same danger. The Bog Turtle is a critically endangered species measuring just about 7-10 centimeters. With a mahogany shell with yellow and orange spots, identifying the turtle is easy. It is native to just the eastern United States, with two distinct populations – the north and south. The northern population is spread throughout Pennyslvania, New Jersey, New York, Delaware and Connecticut. The southern population lives in South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee and Georgia. The two populations are separated only by about 400 kilometers. Researchers didn’t discover Bog Turtles in Tennessee until the 1980s.
As a brief side note, turtles and tortoises are different, from their diet to their dwellings. The most noticeable differences being the shells and the feet. Tortoise shells are more rounded and dome-like, while turtles are flat. Turtles have webbed feet, while tortoise have more stump-like legs, similar to elephants.
The zoo, partnering with Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency and the Nature Conservancy, started doing field work to find the Bog Turtles. The goal was to find bog sites, count the population, and work on conservation.
Initially, only two sites with turtles were found. A third was discovered, but there were no turtles. It was the perfect habitat for them. So researchers kept this bog in mind when they began to release captive bred turtles.
Unfortunately, weeks after releasing turtles into the third bog, researchers were unable to find any of the turtles. They feared raccoons were eating them. But just four years later, they observed the site again and found four year old Bog Turtles. The originally released turtles had been safe and even bred in the four years.
Once finding adult turtles in bogs, researchers would take them into captivity. The adults would breed and lay eggs, which the researchers would take and incubate. Releasing the adults, they would focus on the babies, rearing them for a year. After the first year, the young Bog Turtles would be put in an in-ground tub. This exposes them to the outside, natural UV radiation, the sounds of birds, and minimal human interaction, to “regain the fear of big things standing over them,” Moxley confirms. One more year and the turtles are released into the bog site. The researchers looked at an 84% success rate of hatchlings per year.
Moxley washes his hands after handling a tortoise and goes outside. He walks to a wooden-fenced off area and opens the gate. Inside are the four tubs, buried in the ground, with miniature bogs inside each. Moxley turns off the electric fence surrounding the tubs and steps over.
“How do the turtles get out?” squeaks a voice from the other side of the wooden fence.
Moxley smiles at the little girl standing with her father. “It was cold last night, so they buried themselves in the mud to stay warm. They’ll be able to get themselves out,” he answers.
There are four total bog sites now. “Something needs to be done to save the turtles. Bogs aren’t a fixture of the southeastern United States, “ explains Moxley. Bogs are an environment type that changes. “If you leave a bog be, it will turn into a forest. If we allowed red maples to grow in the bog, it would dry up. The mosses would dry out and die. It’s a natural succession. You need big mammals, like cattle. We use domestic cattle in the bog sites to stomp on roots, break things off, and eat woody vegetation.
“People love wetlands. They want to build there and they want to farm there. That’s what happens to bogs in Tennessee,” continues Moxley. Habitat destruction is one of the Bog Turtle’s main threats.
Another threat is the pet trade. Moxley used to hear “horror stories” of a poacher knowing the location of a bog site and going in and collecting them. Since Bog Turtles breed until they die, removing one female from a population can be crippling. By taking several, a poacher can ruin an entire population. Luckily, regulation has taken effect and reduced the pet trade of the Bog Turtle.
Despite protecting the turtles, Moxley says that “captive breeding and release programs are somewhat controversial. Some people believe in it, some people don’t. The complexity of conserving animals is so multi-faceted and complicated it makes it mind-boggling. You can’t just leave the animals to their own devices. The habitat has to be managed. The population has to be monitored. There are aspects a lot of people don’t realize.”
Researchers have to take into account habitat viability, genetic variety, if a population will be stable for 100, 500, or 1000 years.
“When you think it about enough, it just makes you feel like what we’re doing isn’t even enough. Why even bother?” Moxley asks, but finds solace almost immediately, “All I can say is that everything is interconnected. By removing certain things and continuing to remove things, humans will not be able to live on this planet much longer.
“The turtles are doing better. The Tennessee population is looking up. On the small scale, we’re succeeding. But we need to take into account huge things like climate change and over-population. The turtles are a relic population – a relic of another age and I want them to stay here.”