West Virginia Turtle Die-Off Linked To Ranavirus

CLENDENIN, W.Va. -- In July, while walking near a small pond he had built on his farm near Clendenin, Bill Archibald spotted a pair of dead eastern box turtles in the brush.

"I didn't think a whole lot about it at first," Archibald recalled, "but then I noticed other turtles in the same area acting kind of lethargic, with swelling around their eyes, lying in the same spot for days, and I started to wonder what was going on." When Archibald returned to his farm following a weeklong trip to Alaska, "every day that I walked up to the pond I'd find dead turtles."

The mysterious deaths, which numbered 26 by the end of the summer, didn't sit well with Archibald, a graduate of the state Division of Natural Resources' Master Naturalist program, who had built the pond to enhance habitat for the frogs, salamanders and turtles living on his land. He emailed Doug Wood, a retired Department of Environmental Protection biologist who teaches several Master Naturalist classes.

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But Siegel and his Towson colleagues found that an alarming number of turtles -- which can live to be 50 or older and normally have a 98 percent survival rate from year to year -- were dying at the relocation area near the construction site. Thirty-one of the 123 turtles outfitted with the transmitters and released there were found dead within a three-year period. Cars or construction equipment killed three of the turtles, but the rest were felled by disease, which turned out to be ranavirus in 27 cases. "Finding even one dead turtle is unusual," Siegel said in a Washington Post story about the die-off that appeared earlier this year. "Finding over 27 dead turtles in a two-to-three-year period was bizarre."

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http://wvgazette.com/News/201211240036