Photo by Jackie Guzy their primary food is periwinkles , but they also eat fiddler crabs and a myriad of other small , salt-marsh animals . One remarkable thing about terrapins is their fidelity to their home creek . Many of the terrapins we have caught have been captured many times ( some more than 20 times !), and they are nearly always in the exact same creek in which we found them before .
Although terrapins are worthy of our appreciation and attention simply because they are really beautiful , unique animals , they also play key roles in the health of salt marsh ecosystems . Research has shown that periwinkle snails are one of the primary consumers of salt marsh grasses ( Spartina sp .) and that when predators of periwinkles , such as terrapins , are removed from the ecosystem , large die-offs of marsh grass can occur . Such die-offs can drastically alter these critically important ecosystems , turning vast areas of salt marsh into giant mudflats .
Unfortunately , one of the major findings of our 34-year-old study , is that Kiawah ’ s terrapins are disappearing . I no longer can see 40 turtles in one small section of Fiddler Creek , or any tidal creek on Kiawah Island for that matter . Over the last 10 years or so , after hours of intense sampling and multiple seine hauls , we do well to capture five terrapins in Fiddler Creek . The terrapins that once filled Terrapin Creek , where Whit and his children caught the very first terrapins of the Kiawah study are almost completely gone . It appears the terrapin population at Kiawah is about 20 percent of what it was in the mid-1990s . The important question of course , is why ?
Like so much in nature , there is no single , simple answer . Because we have been studying the turtles at Kiawah since 1983 , our long-term data represent a tremendous resource that provides the foundation for understanding many of the causes of the population declines . For example , a recently published study led by Lynea Witczak from Davidson College
38 Naturally Kiawah