J. Whitfield Gibbons

Many examples exist of studies that have been done with turtles and that have made their way into textbooks and become part of the culture of turtle biology. I have been involved in a few of these and would like to take some examples, give the historical background of how we got there, and tell you the lessons I learned about students, turtles, and myself. Among these are the classic study by David Clark that first demonstrated that herbivorous turtles are carnivorous when they’re young, how Judy Greene discovered that X-ray technology could be used to determine clutch size, and how Mike Duever, Trip Lamb, and Jeff Lovich proved me wrong in saying Kinosternon baurii did not occur in South Carolina. I will not address the vital and breath-taking issues of whether turtles are reptiles or whether alligators are birds, whether T. s. scripta should be called the yellow belly slider turtle or the yellow-bellied slider turtle, and whether a Pacific pond turtle is more closely related to a European pond turtle than it is to a spotted turtle. I realize all of these are equally critical topics that deserve unending debate but this is only a banquet speech.
Banquet Address

<< Back to Abstract Listing