The box turtles clean up nicely

Here’s Easty dirty, with a dull-looking shell and a pretty serious ‘tub ring’ of hard-water stains around the crown of her carapace. This shot is a few years old, but she looks about the same now when she’s filthy. But here’s how she cleans up:

On Saturday I gave her a good soak in some warm distilled water and scrubber her shell with a toothbrush. She shined up beautifully. I should have tried shooting a video, because the keratinous scutes are a bit translucent, and when full sunlight hits them they take on a depth and luster that I had not previously appreciated.

I shot some reference images in the cardinal directions. If you need dorsal, lateral, or ventral views of an adult female Three-toed box turtle, Terrapene carolina triunguis, it’s your lucky day.

The lateral view is interesting, because you can clearly see the joint between the two halves of her plastron, both of which can raise like drawbridges to completely seal her behind an impenetrable wall of bone and keratin. You can also tell that her posterior plastron is gently convex, which is a female trait. As in many other turtles, male box turtles tend to have at least a gently concave posterior plastron, to help them stay on top of the females during mating.

And a ventral view, giving a good look at her plastron. Note her tiny, tiny tail, with the swelling for the vent just visible in the shadow of the plastron, about even with the edge of the carapace — that’s another female trait, whereas males have longer tails and a more distal vent for mating. You can also see yellow lines cutting across some of the scutes of her plastron — those are the outlines of her plastral bones showing through the overlying keratin. As in carapace, the keratinous scutes overlap the edges of the bones to form a sort of biological plywood. A lot of the growth lines have been worn off of her plastron, which is totally normal, but for the most part you can tell where the growth centers were originally located.

I also gave baby turtle a proper bath, with supervision. Baby box turtles can swim just fine, but if the water is inconveniently deep they can sometimes get flipped over on their backs, be unable to right themselves, and drown. She really did not like not having something to haul out on, so I put in the black jar lid you see in the photo. This particular pic is overexposed, which was a happy accident, because now you can see that the apparently dark and featureless areas of her shell and head are in fact very intricately patterned (compare to her dry photo at the top of this post). I’m really looking forward to seeing how her colors come in over the next few years.

And here’s her plastron. Baby turtle is a different subspecies from Easty — she’s a true Eastern box turtle, Terrapene carolina carolina — so she should have stronger patterns on both her carapace and her plastron when she gets bigger. Her head my also be more vibrantly colored, although Easty is no slouch in that department.

I put the two of them next to each other for a very closely-supervised comparison shot. I had been worried that Easty might have a go at baby turtle, but actually the opposite was true. The wee monster frankly terrorized Easty by nipping at her toes –and this was after eating two small slugs from the back yard — so I brought that experiment to a swift end, and got nipped on the finger for my trouble. I happened to be filming when baby turtle nipped Easty’s toe and my finger, and I will try to get those videos cleaned up and posted soon. Watch this space.