|
| |
|
As an eighth-generation native born and raised in Florida, exploring my tropical home state and encountering my fellow Floridians is an ongoing adventure. During my 13 years I have traveled from our state capital, Tallahassee, to our nation's oldest settlement, St. Augustine. I have enjoyed swimming in the Atlantic Ocean on the east coast, in the Gulf of Mexico on the west coast, and snorkeling in the Keys in the southernmost part of our country. Throughout these travels, meeting and learning about the unique animals that are native to Florida is the part I enjoy the most. For our Labor Day weekend, my family and I traveled to Lake Wales, to the Circle F Dude Ranch. Lake Wales is located on the geographic landform known as the Central Ridge and is near Iron Mountain, which is the highest point in Florida, at a whopping 325 feet above sea level! After breakfast, we put on our jeans and boots and headed to the corral. There I met Bullet, a brown horse who was going to take me on a trail ride. We rode single file down the sandy trail towards the lake. As I was enjoying this relaxing ride, I began noticing mounds of sand with approximately 12-inch holes leading underground. I live in the land of the armadillo and burrowing rodents, but these holes looked different: semicircular and large, not small and round like rodent holes. I motioned to my dad to look because as we neared the water the mounds became less frequent. Our guide identified these mysterious holes as the homes of Gopherus polyphemus, better known as gopher tortoises. Instantly I knew that I wanted to investigate these holes and the unique animals that live inside them. |
 Dawn examines a gopher tortoise hole. I learned that gopher tortoises live in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and they are federally listed as "threatened" in Louisiana. They belong to a group of land tortoises that were part of a savanna fauna that migrated into the southeastern United States millions of years ago. Gopher tortoises are thought to live 40 to 60 years (Puckett, p. 1). They are burrowing reptiles that live primarily in dry pinelands, which explains why they have shovel-like forelimbs, unlike the more common box turtle. They may also live in dry prairies, dunes, and can even live in man-made environments such as fields, pastures, and roadsides. They must have open, sunny areas for nesting, and plants for food (Puckett, p. 2). This interesting information made me ask: "What kind of survival skills do these tortoises have?"; "Is this reptile important to the ecosystem of Florida?"; and most importantly, with all the growth and development I have seen in Florida, "Is the habitat gopher tortoises need to survive being destroyed?" I worried that without human intervention, these delicate animals may become extinct. |
        
|
|
