Photo by Jackie Guzy their primary food is periwinkles, but they also eat fiddler crabs and a myriad of other small, salt-marsh animals. One remarkable thing about terrapins is their fidelity to their home creek. Many of the terrapins we have caught have been captured many times( some more than 20 times!), and they are nearly always in the exact same creek in which we found them before.
Although terrapins are worthy of our appreciation and attention simply because they are really beautiful, unique animals, they also play key roles in the health of salt marsh ecosystems. Research has shown that periwinkle snails are one of the primary consumers of salt marsh grasses( Spartina sp.) and that when predators of periwinkles, such as terrapins, are removed from the ecosystem, large die-offs of marsh grass can occur. Such die-offs can drastically alter these critically important ecosystems, turning vast areas of salt marsh into giant mudflats.
Unfortunately, one of the major findings of our 34-year-old study, is that Kiawah’ s terrapins are disappearing. I no longer can see 40 turtles in one small section of Fiddler Creek, or any tidal creek on Kiawah Island for that matter. Over the last 10 years or so, after hours of intense sampling and multiple seine hauls, we do well to capture five terrapins in Fiddler Creek. The terrapins that once filled Terrapin Creek, where Whit and his children caught the very first terrapins of the Kiawah study are almost completely gone. It appears the terrapin population at Kiawah is about 20 percent of what it was in the mid-1990s. The important question of course, is why?
Like so much in nature, there is no single, simple answer. Because we have been studying the turtles at Kiawah since 1983, our long-term data represent a tremendous resource that provides the foundation for understanding many of the causes of the population declines. For example, a recently published study led by Lynea Witczak from Davidson College
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