Saving the tiniest turtle in the United States

The southern bog turtle, Glyptemys muhlenbergii, is the smallest turtle in North America and, arguably, the most adorable. After it hatches, an individual measures about as big as a quarter; by adulthood, it maxes out at the length of a computer mouse. It’s identifiable by bright and curving orange, red, or yellow patterns at the base of the neck, which you can only see when it extends its very small head out of the shell. “They’re easy to fall in love with,” says wildlife biologist J.J. Apodaca, who has a trim salt-and-pepper beard and wears knee high waders.

With the tree canopy open above us and peaks visible in the distance, we’re standing in a muddy, shallow wetland area called a fen in the Blue Ridge Mountains of northwest North Carolina. He reaches into a small opening in the ground that, until a few seconds ago, had been obscured by a tangle of tussock sedge and other tall grasses. The hole swallows his wrist, then his forearm, almost reaching the rolled-up sleeve of his shirt. The pocket is surprisingly roomy and deep, which is notable because on the surface the fen appears flat and shallow.

That little underwater room is a perfect place to find a turtle, Apodaca says, but it’s empty today. He extracts his arm, now smeared with wet mud that’s brown that’s reddish and almost purple, to explore another hummock. He gently probes the surrounding grasses and mud with a long stick, feeling for the telltale knock against a hard shell.

Southern bog turtles are among the most imperiled reptiles in the country. Even before Hurricane Helene ripped through this area in September 2024, the creatures faced an uphill battle for survival, and their numbers were dwindling. The hurricane—and the mountains of water it brought to the area’s wetlands—only made things worse.

Now, all that stands between the runtish reptile and extinction is a small army of volunteers and scientists like Apodaca, who has been working on turtle-related projects for more than a decade. He runs Tangled Bank Conservation, an environmental company in Asheville, and the Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy (ARC), a nonprofit organization that focuses on protecting the animals and their habitats. They’re both part of a larger collaboration among landowners, nonprofits and state and federal government agencies to save the threatened turtles.

Ever since the storm, says Apodaca, biologists have been trying to assess the destruction, search for survivors, and restore the fragile habitat for the southern bog turtle and other threatened species, often by resorting to creative, scrappy solutions. The goal is to build resiliency in the animal populations, but the timeline is short. All those steps have to happen simultaneously.

“It’s taking what you know about what makes the habitat appealing and sort of reinstating that mechanically, like putting it back in place,” he says. “It’s very hands on the ground. You have to roll up your sleeves and get dirty to recover the species.”

How Helene piled on to existing threats

Bog turtles’ struggles start at birth: Less than half even hatch from their inch-long eggs, with the rest lost to drowning, predators or heat, or crushed by animals passing through. The survivors face more risks. “Raccoons eat a ton,” says Apodaca. So do mid-size mammals like skunks, minks, and foxes. To these meso-predators, “they’re just all delicious little snacks,” says Apodaca. Especially the turtle babies, with their soft shells.

Humans threaten the turtles, too: indirectly through habitat destruction, as land development gobbled up the bogs, and directly, through poaching. A single turtle fetches thousands of dollars on the underground exotic pet market, according to the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD). The cost to the turtles is much higher: Mathematical models predict that the loss of just one egg-laying female per year can be enough to “doom the population,” says Apodaca.

(Read more about the impact of the illegal pet trade on bog turtles.)

These are just the ordinary, day-to-day forces threatening the bog turtle with extinction. On top of those are what Apodaca calls “stochastic events”—random cataclysms with high potential for enormous damage and low likelihood. Hurricane Helene, for example. Over four days, the tempest unloaded 40 trillion gallons of water on the Southeastern United States, including the bogs and fens where the turtles live. Some areas received more than 30 inches. Narrow streams swelled into raging torrents; riverbanks vanished; fens and bogs drowned.

In North Carolina, more than 100 people died, and the water swept away homes and roads and almost the entire business district of Chimney Rock, an iconic tourist destination southeast of Asheville. In the Pigeon River Gorge, near the Tennessee border, two lanes of interstate I-40 are still missing, and the rebuild likely won’t be finished before 2028. Water churned through the hollows, and the sediment and debris sloppily remodeled many of the watery pockets where bog turtles live to catastrophic effect. While it’s difficult to precisely count how many turtles or habitats were lost, Apodaca says, initial estimates “don’t look good” for many of the known sites. 

Restoring these habitats is not easy: Given the fragile nature of the bog ecosystem, backhoes and front loaders can’t roll in to remove debris. Most of the work must be done by volunteers and conservationists who make their way through the muck, digging out the gravelly sediment that buried hummocks and filled in waterways, and occasionally finding dead turtles buried in the rush of debris. Finding live ones isn’t easy, either. They are secretive. Where other, larger turtles warm themselves by basking on sun-drenched logs, bog turtles instead spend most of their time in mud or under water. They regulate their body temperature by seeking out heat gradients in the messy, muddy bogs and fens that they inhabit. Because of this reclusively, a census of survivors must rely on sampling, prediction, and models, rather than a direct count.

But there’s also reason for hope—in this particular fen, today, where Apodaca is poking at the muddy mess. The area is owned and managed by the Nature Conservancy. The turtles living here have been doing all right since the storm, he says, thanks to a mix of strategies. “We hope that this can become sort of ground zero for recovery,” he says, “that we can produce young offspring here that go to sites we’ve lost, or new sites.” It’s a model, he says, for what biologists have learned—and what comes next. 

As if on cue, Emilly Nolan, a cheerful conservation biologist in tall black waders with hair spilling out from beneath an ARC ballcap, announces she’s found one. Its head is tucked inside the shell; the entire thing fits on her palm with room to spare. She runs her finger along the edge of the shell, feeling for nearly imperceptible notches that would identify the turtle as one that conservation groups have already tagged. It’s hard to tell at first, but soon she determines that this turtle is a newbie. She’s delighted. She unpacks the tools needed otherwise add it to the list of known inhabitants: calipers, a scale, a nail file, a clipboard. As she sits down in a folding chair to begin meeting the new guy or gal—it’s not always easy to tell at first—Nolan says she began her career in “toads and frogs,” but was won over by the turtle’s charisma. “They are pretty charming,” she says, and gets to work.

(See photos of overlooked freshwater habitats.)

A tale of two turtles

It hasn’t always been this way. A few hundred years ago, the Appalachian valleys of western North Carolina and adjoining states hosted about 5,000 acres of bogs and fens, the natural habitats for the bog turtle. But farms moved in, and so did roads, fast food joints, shopping centers, parking lots, and other buildings.

This wasn’t just a problem in Appalachia: According to a landmark 1990 report from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service the continental United States, on average, lost more than 60 acres of wetlands every hour between the 1780s and the 1980s. The mountain bogs were drained, the turtles lost, and today only about 500 acres of bogs remain in the region, scattered across the mountain lowlands like jewels fallen from a broken necklace.

On top of the loss of habitat, the plight of the southern bog turtle has been long overlooked compared to that of its northern bog turtle brethren. The two are distinct, but indistinguishable, lineages—populations of the same species, separated by around 250 miles. (Given the homebody tendencies of the animals, they’re unlikely to ever meet.) Northern bog turtles inhabit wetlands with open canopies in northern Maryland and Pennsylvania, up to parts of New York and Massachusetts, while the southern population can be found in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia.

In 1997, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the northern population as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), and the southern population as “threatened by similarity of appearance.” In practice, that was meant to prevent poachers from collecting northern bog turtles and claiming that they came from the southern areas. It ruled out possession, meaning people couldn’t remove southern bog turtles from the wild. But that also meant landowners in the south could legally bulldoze their bogs, destroy the habitat, and kill the turtles, and that’s how it’s been ever since. “It doesn't protect the bog turtles’ habitat at all,” says biologist Will Harlan, a scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD).

At that time northern turtles received federal protection, biologists assumed, based on informal observations, that the turtles were thriving in the south and didn’t require further protection. But since then, studies of extant turtles by state biologists showed that southern bogs likely hosted only a few thousand individuals, and their numbers are declining. In 2022, the CBD decided to petition the U.S. government to list the southern bog turtle as “endangered” or “threatened,” says Harlan, “when we realized that the southern population had probably crashed and was doing worse than the northern population.”

State reports estimated that only 14 viable sites in the state remain—a viable state has enough turtles to persist for another 50 years or so—with a population of 2000 or fewer. But many of those sites, Harlan says, don’t have enough females to sustain themselves, and surveys suggest that the bog turtle populations have declined by 50 percent this century. 

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has to decide by October 2028; if the southern bog turtle is declared to be endangered, then killing or injuring the turtles would be prohibited by federal law. (Destroying or modifying the habitat of an endangered species was also illegal until July 2026, when the Trump Administration weakened protections outlined in the ESA. Read more about what changes to the ESA could mean for wildlife.)

Rebuilding the bog habitats that remain

In the meantime, conservation biologists are working quickly to shore up what turtles, and resources, remain, as in the northern fen where Nolan is now measuring the newfound turtle. Next, she’ll use the file to notch the edges of three specific scutes—the hard scales that combine to form a shell—corresponding to a unique three-digit number.

As Nolan gets to work on the critter, Apodaca points out the turtle-preserving strategies that they’re developing on-site. There are cages, used to protect nests and newly laid eggs from predators in the summer. There’s a tunnel that passes underneath the nearby, busy road, that helps the turtles avoid becoming roadkill. Against a tree at the end of the fen are tall stacks of buckets with wide notches cut out of either side. Attached to the bottom of the bucket is a motion-activated game camera. When the bucket is placed upside down, the camera catches images of turtles—or the occasional bog lemming, or other small thing—as they walk through. Surrounding one open meadow where they often find new nests runs a low electric fence that dissuades invasion from raccoons and other predators.

Other changes they’ve made are less obvious. They’ve moved logs around to shift the flow of water and avoid swamping the protective hummocks where the turtles lay eggs. They’ve cut down large trees that grew in otherwise open areas, since bog turtles prefer open fens with open canopies. On one small incline on the side of the fen, the ground changes quickly from spongy, muddy wetland to a thick tongue of gravel and rocks that runs up the hill. This stony mess is left from the hurricane, he says, and buried a sizable area of the wetland. “If there’s too much sediment, they can’t lay their eggs,” Apodaca says. It still needs to be cleared. 

In addition to keeping tabs on the turtles that they can find during surveys, conservationists take eggs from the wild to the Knoxville Zoo, where they’re raised, in safety, for the first year. In that time, says Apodaca, those animals grow to the size that wild turtles would reach in two or three years, and they continue to grow faster even after returning to their habitat. A turtle’s risk of death is much higher near the start of its life than after it reaches adulthood, Apodaca says, and this “head start” program helps clear that hurdle. It may also help grow turtle populations that might live in other nearby fens.

There’s more than one way to save a species

Bog turtles’ current plight reflects the fate of many reptiles in the area after the catastrophic damage of Hurricane Helene. The storm’s floodwaters destroyed the interstitial gaps between rivers and streams inhabited by hellbender salamanders, entombing those spaces by filling them with sediment. The Hickory Nut Gorge green salamander faced similar chaos along its namesake gorge southeast of Asheville, a natural funnel for floodwater.

(How removing a dam could save North Carolina's “lasagna lizard”)

For turtles and other species, Apodaca says it’s not always clear which strategies are the most effective. The turtle population in the fen where he and Nolan took me is thriving, for now, though it’s hard to know whether that’s because of the caged nests, the electric fence, the head start program, or the restoration efforts like tree removal. More likely, it’s due to some combination of strategies, and conservation groups hope to replicate those successes in other vulnerable wetlands with smaller turtle populations, he says.

The overarching strategy is to try to not only recreate a viable fen as it flowed before the hurricane, but to make it as turtle friendly as possible. And not just one fen: They’re looking for all possible fens. Collaborations between ARC and its partners, including the Nature Conservancy and the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, are using satellite images, lidar, and other technological tools to build predictive spatial models of the area to identify promising bogs they may not know about. Ultra-precise imaging “gives us this ability to get data at a level we’ve never had before, and to understand their distribution,” Apodaca says.

All of these pieces—from the satellites to the nest cages—add up to a multiphase effort for recovery, aimed at better understanding the turtle and its habitat. “This species is to the point where we don’t have the luxury of waiting, you know, 20 years to get better data,” Apodaca says. “We need to step in now and be also doing recovery at the same time.”

The urgency is exacerbated, says Harlan, by recent political decisions that place the turtle in hot water. Recent Supreme Court rulings have significantly weakened wetlands safeguards, and the Trump administration has pushed to drop the southern population’s existing protection due to similarity of appearance. “Bog turtles are threatened more than ever as a result of things that have happened since we've petitioned for them,” Harlan says. “A bog turtle can't live without its wetlands habitat. That is what makes a bog turtle a bog turtle. It's in its name. And so if you can't protect the bog, you can't protect the turtle, right?”