Female Spotted Turtle (Clemmys guttata)
Saturday Turtle Journal visited the abandoned Goldwitz cranberry bog in Marion on the SouthCoast of Massachusetts to check on the spotted turtle mating aggregation. Sue Wieber Nourse found and captured two mature spotted turtles, both more than 12 years old, a female and a small male. Spotted turtles (Clemmys guttata) are small aquatic turtles found in shallow wetlands. In this area, spotteds are most often observed in April and May when they migrate to mating aggregations. Once temperatures rise with the summer, they disappear from sight.
 
Spotted Turtle Pair (Female Left) Carapaces
The male spotted was a very tiny adult as you can detect from these two comparison photographs. Yet, he was a great deal bolder than the female, which remained for the most part tucked inside her shell.
 
Spotted Turtle Pair (Female Left) Plastrons
Looking at their respective plastrons, you can easily see the gender difference. The female has a flat pastron on the left, and the male has a concavity behind the bridge.   The male is also showing his thicker and longer tail.
 
Female Spotted Turtle Injured Right Rear Limb
This female spotted had sustained a severe injury to her right rear. A large chip had broken off her right rear marginal scutes and a significant portion of her right rear limb had been snipped off. These signs point to an encounter with a vehicle that ran over this section of the shell and pinched her leg off. It’s fairly amazing because the abandoned Goldwitz bog lies a good distance, a half mile, from the nearest public road. You would think they would be safe from such accidents. Unfortunately, these wetland are frequented by speeding ATVs that race along the bog channel service roads.
Spotted Turtle Pair Released Back into Bog
After we had measured, weighed and marked these two individuals, neither of which had been seen during our half decade study of this system, Don Lewis released them back into the bog channel that hosts the spring mating aggregation each May.