Goessling HERPeTOLOGY Lab at Eckerd College

As noted by Dioum, positive conservation results can only be expected from a better understanding of the factors affecting the loss of biological diversity, and ultimately disseminating this knowledge. This is a unifying thesis of all academia: gaining understanding, disseminating understanding, and using understanding to defend and advance the greater good.

OUR GOAL 

In the Goessling lab, we are zoologists who focus our efforts on understanding a diversity of proximate mechanisms and ultimate effects of environmental change on ectothermic tetrapods (i.e., reptiles and amphibians, "herps"). We are taxonomically biased in approach for two reasons. First, we all share at least a basic interest in, if not a love for, reptiles and amphibians; this bias is personal and of no specific scientific merit. Second, because their physiologies are uniquely tied to the environment, especially temperature, these taxa serve as prime experimental models for quantifying the effects of environmental change.

NEWS

• We currently have a full-time field crew conducting follow-up mark-recapture surveys of our head-started Gopher Tortoises in Alabama. So far, so good! We are seeing lots of chunky tortoises that spent a few years of life on campus now thriving in their native southern Alabama forest. Other cool finds include rare (and quite large) native snakes at the study site!

• We recently wrapped up a six-week student internship on Egmont Key that took us out to the island to update the mark-recapture dataset of Gopher Tortoises there. This study started in 1994, and so far, we have marked more than a thousand individual tortoises! Check out some cool local media attention we got for this project here. The project was supported by The Egmont Key Alliance, Hubbards Marina (who provided daily ferry rides to the island), and several benefactors. Our interns, Jeff, Pixie, Sephie, and Tristan are all top-notch Eckerd students and did an awesome job!

• Our most-recent paper is one that compared methods of counting Gopher Tortoises at Boyd Hill Nature Preserve, which is just about two miles from campus and boasts an exceptional community of native Florida reptiles. This was a cool study that involved dozens of Eckerd student researchers and three years of field work. Here's a link to the paper. 

• We also recently published a paper that tested gopher tortoise social networks, referred to as "cliques", and found that tortoises behaviorally partition themselves in a relatively small area into several distinct social groupings. Check out the paper here.

• We are wrapping up a field-based study of gopher tortoise fine-scale spatial ecology, utilizing state-of-the-art autonomous GPS trackers, which record a position every 15 minutes! 

• We recently submitted a paper for peer review that documented very high survival and site fidelity of our captive-reared ("head-started") gopher tortoises that were returned to their source in southern Alabama during summer 2022. It has been very rewarding to see this ambitious project take such shape! We are also wrapping up a study that will test how individual tortoise behavior in captivity during the head-start period may have contributed to their post-release success.

• We are continuing long-term research and conservation work on Aruba. We just finalized an island-wide study of Boa constrictor reproductive biology, and we are also reinvigorating an island-wide study of the endemic Aruba Island Rattlesnake. 

CONTACT

Please contact Dr. Goessling (goessljm@eckerd.edu) should you be interested in our work.

If you'd like to email our broader Goessling lab group (including numerous Eckerd students!), please email glab-users@eckerd.edu.