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CHAPTER 8 Techniques in Herpetology: To Catch a Cooter The people and organizations who support ecological research usually do not realize how much time must go into the failures before a successful technique is developed. It seems to be accepted practice in medicine to try everything until we develop the cure and then once the cure is found to decide the efforts were all worthwhile. The same is true in ecological research and it is only fair that scientists report their failures so that others will not try them again. However, reporting a failure is not the style of most people, including myself, and it is only following success, if even then, that one dares talk about the failures that led to it. We have developed numerous techniques and approaches in the study of herpetology that have been successful. But in some ways certain of the failures were greater adventures than attempts that turned out right. One that comes to mind started on a day in late spring 1979 at the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory. We needed a sample of river cooters. They were important for a turtle study we had in progress. The river cooter was one species ofturtle for which we had not been able to obtain samples. We had taken a number ofexcursions up and down the Savannah River to see literally hundreds of cooters basking on fallen trees along the river. We had tried trapping them, to no avail, because cooters do not eat fish or other bait as readily as most turtles; instead they eat vegetation. You might ask, why not bait your trap with vegetation? But why should a turtle go into a trap to get vegetation that is all around it anyway? No, something else would have to be tried. We did find that some individuals could be approached closely with a motor boat, and in fact we were able to catch one or two this way, but that took half a day. Then we tried using a shotgun to To Catch a Cooter. 105 shoot them off the logs. The problem with that is that ifyou are far enough away in a boat for the turtle not to become wary, then you are too far away to grab it in time before it falls off the log after being shot. The brown Savannah claims anything that goes beneath the surface. Shooting turtles off logs from a boat did not work either. Finally, we arrived at what surely would be the perfect technique : inner tubes. Using inner tubes would allow us to float downriver to a log with turtles while carrying a shotgun or rifle to shoot the specimen from close range so it could be captured a split second after being shot. Garfield Keaton and Ray Semlitsch designed our floats, and we gave it a try. Frequently in field research you feel you are given a warning and then another warning, and always when you look back you wish you had taken the first one as advice. Sure enough, before we reached the river that day, we received our first warning. The region had received more than two inches of rain the previous day and the level of the river was up almost six feet. The day was beautiful with clear skies, almost cool in the morning, but because water had been released from Clark Hill reservoir that night, the river was definitely up. We had a four-wheel-drive truck as we took the dirt road toward Jackson Landing through the bottomland hardwood forest. Soon we were hubcap deep in water that seemed to be getting gradually deeper. Someone unfamiliar with this southern swampland might have marveled at oak-hickory woods where all the trees were standing in water, but such flooding happens often. I was driving, trying to stay in the road, which looked more like a stream channel, when Garfield lifted his feet and remarked that they were wet. Next Ray was exclaiming, "Pick the rifles up!" as he scrambled for the guns that we had put behind the back seat on the floor. My error was in opening the door, intending to look down to see how far the water was below us, only to realize that the water level was almost a foot above the floor ofthe truck. Ray did save the rifles as the brown wave washed into the truck and left us sitting shin deep in Savannah River floodplain water. We rescued everything we could...

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