Endangered
Spotted turtle
Clemmys guttata
Spotted turtle is a turtle in the family Emydidae — Clemmys guttata, recorded as Endangered.
Appearance
The spotted turtle is small and has a gray to black base color. Its upper shell (carapace) is smooth, does not have a central ridge running down the middle (called a "keel"), and grows to 3.5–12.5 cm (1.4–4.9 in) in length. It is also totally black and contains anywhere from zero to about one hundred yellow spots, that are a defining characteristic of this turtle.
Their broad, smooth, low upper shell, or carapace, reaches 8–12 cm (3.1–4.7 in) upon adulthood, and ranges in its exact colour from black to a bluish black with a number of tiny yellow round spots.
Range and habitat
The spotted turtle ranges from southern Maine, Quebec, and Ontario, south along the eastern US to Florida in the east and central Indiana and Ohio in the west. Disjunct populations exist in the Canadian portion of its range and also in central Illinois, central Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Indiana. In Indiana and Illinois, the species is found only in the northern portion of the state but it is found on most of the lower peninsula of Michigan.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Breeding
In the warmest part of the summer (when water temperatures exceed 30 °C), they may aestivate terrestrially or aquatically for long periods of time. During summer dormancy, the turtles may burrow into leaf litter in woodlands or marsh edges or open fields. Others remain in muskrat burrows or other aquatic refuges.
Sexual maturity is not reached until age 8, upon that researchers found that courtship and nesting periods typically ranged from March until June. The courtships involved females being frantically chased by one to several males for approximately 15 to 30 minutes. Females later constructed their nest in well-drained areas that were exposed to full sunlight.
In crisis
Although the spotted turtle has been observed in Quebec, no permanent population is known to exist there. Even so, 104 populations have been discovered in Ontario. Of the original 104 sites noted, 36 are known to no longer have spotted turtles.
Despite the seemingly large number of populations in Canada, many are not self-sustaining because of the following reasons: the majority of the populations are small, they all have less than 200 individuals, and the areas are all isolated from one another. All told it is estimated that anywhere from 1000 to 2000 spotted turtles live in Canada even so, with individual populations ceasing to exist, this number is declining.
CITES lists this taxon on Appendix II. Confirm the current appendix on the CITES checklist.
Spotted turtle is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Spotted turtle, Wikidata item Q845189. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
