The yellow-blotched map turtle is another aptly named beauty.
Navigator Jake takes his direction giving seriously. With the map turtle atlas open on his lap, he sought directions from both the GPS and his cellphone.
OK—go west, next left, next right, 2nd left, next left… and magically, just ahead of us was a bridge. We had reached the Pascagoula or at least one of its tributaries and as we looked down from the bridge we saw yellow-blotched sawbacks on every snag. And then, a bit upriver we saw 3 big map turtles, the two largest of which had BIG heads and were watching us with great interest. Map turtles are wary—very wary, and we hastened to take as many pix as we were able before the chelonians decided we were a threat and dove from their basking stations.
But we had succeeded. That stop had produced the “twofer” we had hoped for—the yellow-blotched map turtle, Graptemys flavimaculata, a sawbacked species (3-7” females the larger), and the Pascagoula map turtle, Graptemys gibbonsi, one of the broad-headed species (3-8 ½”, females the larger).
Based on temporal marking shape and genetic differences the Pascagoula map turtle, also referred to as Gibbon’s map turtle, was rather recently split away from the Alabama map.
“Where next?” Jake asked.
He looked unconvinced at my response, “the Pearl River.”
But within moments he had reassumed his navigator stance and it was westward, Ho!
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