Summer for many people is a relaxing time of year when things start to slow down a bit. The bulk of my research, however, is condensed into a chaotic 3 month period when turtles are nesting and as it just so happens, the time of year when many of the biting insects are in greatest abundance.
Currently, I’m spending much of my time in the lab either grading assignments from the Introductory Biology lab I teach, or working on in-lab experiments looking at how factors like fluctuating incubation temperature affect organisms, and in my case turtles, with temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD).
Each week, my adviser and I make the four and a half hour journey from Birmingham to Dauphin Island. Here, we perform surveys and field experiments to better understand the ecology and biology of the Diamondback terrapin, a severely depleted species in Alabama.
This week we drove down to do some radio tracking of female terrapins that we had released earlier in June, release a female that we had been captured the previous week, and pick up a new female that was captured a few days before we arrived. Summer can be hectic and even feel overwhelming at times, but I couldn’t see myself being happy doing anything else.
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