New Jersey is home to a series of elevated overpasses and tunnels that protect animals from busy roads and traffic. For one vulnerable species whose Jersey Shore nesting grounds have been usurped by development, roads are not a barrier to be navigated, but a replacement location for laying eggs.
The diamondback terrapin emerges from its marshy home once a year to breed on dry terrain, and biologists from the Stone Harbor-based Wetlands Institute have crafted a robust program to divert the turtles from thoroughfares that pose a grave danger.
The only reptile in the northeastern United States that spends its entire life in brackish, or semi-saltwater, ecosystems, the terrapin seeks a place above the high-tide line to nest each summer. Before the building explosion over the past few decades, that was one of the coastline’s countless dunes—now mostly inaccessible due to construction, says research scientist Brian Williamson, who has overseen terrapin research at the Wetlands Institute since 2014. He, his staff and volunteers work tirelessly to maintain fences they built to block the terrapins from traffic, carry any wayward turtles to a safe spot, and collect their eggs for specially designed incubators at Stockton University.
“The female terrapin comes to higher ground for a singular purpose, and the roads are really tempting because they’re usually the closest viable place,” says Williamson. “The turtles might even burrow into the road itself. They just don’t realize the hazard.”
The institute has rescued over 8,500 female terrapins since the program began, and double that number of eggs, which take 8-12 weeks to hatch, Williamson says. Only one in a thousand eggs becomes a hatchling that survives to maturity. Though terrapin harvesting was outlawed in New Jersey in 2016 and the animal is considered a “species of special concern,” it remains threatened by storm drains and the area’s thriving blue-crab trade.
That fate, or death by a vehicle, is something Steve Ahern has made it his mission to prevent. The retired attorney spends an average of five hours a day during nesting season patrolling the roads on behalf of the Wetlands Institute in his hometown, Sea Isle City, where multiple signs proclaim, “Turtle crossing.” Ahern also co-founded an organization, Sea Isle Terrapin Rescue, that placed nesting boxes in the community. “They’re such an important element of the marsh, and I’ve really come to love them,” he says.
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