With the leaves changing and school back in session, many animals in the natural world are turning their attention to preparing for the winter ahead. Many small mammals are caching food, bears are seeking out late berries and calorie-rich foods to put on fat for hibernation, and fall bird migration is well underway. As we’ve written about here before, our turtles usually settle in to an overwintering spot in late October or early November. Of course, that actually means that turtles have several months of “free” time on their hands between the end of egg-laying season in July and their winter dormancy. Late summer and autumn for turtles is a good time to build energy reserves to survive hibernation and recover lost weight for egg-laying females. Perhaps unexpectedly, it’s also prime turtle mating season!
Even though turtles lay their eggs in summer, female turtles can store sperm internally to fertilize next year’s eggs (which have barely even begun to develop yet), so in addition to a mating season in the spring along with most other animals, many of our turtles also have a mating season in the fall. During our focused Blanding’s turtle roundups at the end of summer this year as part of our fecal sample study, we happened to find two turtles mating at Great Meadows. That’s not so unusual in and of itself, but what made the find truly extraordinary was that the male turtle of the pair was an alumnus of our HATCH program! This lucky event marks the first documented mating of any of our headstarted turtles – a moment more than fifteen years in the making.
The turtle in question (originally notched #2, now re-christened #2082 to avoid confusion with another turtle) was raised by students at the Carlisle School in the 2009-2010 school year. They named him “Chubby Oreo,” and his weight when released in June of 2010 was an impressive 182.8 grams. Chubby Oreo was tracked for more than a year before his radio malfunctioned late in 2011 and he disappeared into the depths of the swamp. Eleven years later, in 2022, he was caught again during a trapping survey, now tipping the scales at a generous 882 grams. He was relieved of his old radio, which amazingly had remained attached all those years despite its transmitter dying, and outfitted with a new one. Over the next two years he continued to show remarkable growth, exceeding 1000 grams and reaching full adult size by the spring of 2023.
Chubby Oreo’s mate was the mysterious female #2067. First caught by our team in 2020, 2067 was already a mature and experienced female weighing in at 1288 grams. Although we have tracked her every season, we have never found 2067’s nest, nor have we ever seen her come out to search for a nest site or felt eggs within her abdomen during laying season. It’s possible 2067 had not mated for some years until her rendezvous with 2082, but we will be watching her closely in the summer of 2025, because her clutch next year may contain the first offspring of a headstarted HATCH turtle!