The Urban Naturalist by Steven D. Garber

Author:Steven D. Garber
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780486148328
Publisher: Dover Publications
Published: 2012-10-05T16:00:00+00:00

PAINTED TURTLES

The painted turtle is probably one of the most numerous turtles in North America. This turtle thrives in conditions where few other animals survive. Four subspecies in the United States have an aggregate range extending over the East, Midwest, and Northwest. Painted turtles have stripes of uniform width along the neck, beginning red and becoming yellow farther out on the head. The length of the shell rarely exceeds 6 inches (15 cm). The background color of the carapace is quite dark, while the scutes along the margins are black, red, and yellow, and the scutes along the sides and back are bordered with yellow. The bottom shell, the plastron, is usually yellow.

The eastern painted turtle (Chrysemys picta picta) is distributed from Nova Scotia to Alabama, overlapping considerably from Maine to Pennsylvania with the midland painted turtle (Chrysemys picta marginata), which has some dark markings in the middle of the plastron. The midland subspecies appears to be better adapted to the cooler temperatures of the upland, while the eastern painted turtles, which are distinguished by their pure yellow plastrons, are better adapted to the warm coastal plain of the Atlantic Coast. Some populations of midland turtles colonized coastal land masses when the last glaciation ended and the glacier receded northward. As the glacier melted, the sea level rose, isolating many areas, which became islands. When the climate warmed, eastern painted turtles moved north and mixed with the midland stock, but they couldn’t mix with the stock that had become established on the coastal islands because painted turtles avoid salt water.

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