Talks

Turtle Power! A Guide to Supporting Turtles in Toronto

We advocate, support and protect our Turtle relatives living within some city parks in Tkaronto while embracing all of our kin.  We are an Indigenous guided stewardship program using a two-eyed seeing approach that is supported by Indigenous Elders and community members, Msit No'kmaq and the Indigenous Land Stewardship Circle. 

Carolynne Crawley, Co-founder

Jennifer David, Co-founder

The Blanding’s turtle is a freshwater turtles species found across southern Ontario. It has been designated a Species-At-Risk provincially, federally and globally due to threats such as habitat loss, road mortality, and predation. Though Blanding’s turtles have historically inhabited the Rouge River Watershed, the population has shown drastic declines due to urban sprawl and habitat fragmentation over the past few decades. In 2012, as few as six adults remained in the area and the population was deemed functionally extinct. After over a decade of monitoring in what is now the Rouge National Urban Park (RNUP), Adopt-A-Pond began to supplement the Park's declining Blanding’s turtle population with headstarted juveniles incubated, hatched, and raised at your Toronto Zoo from eggs collected from the wild each year. Headstarting is the process of raising and subsequently releasing individuals into the wild to help rebuild wild populations, since raising turtles in human care for the first few years of their life helps increase their body size and their chances of survival in the wild. This is part of a comprehensive approach to species recovery that also includes habitat stewardship, scientific research, and outreach efforts to save this species from local extinction.

Amy Lathrop serves as the Collections Specialist in Reptiles and Amphibians, has spent 26 years building a career that’s equal parts adventure, science, and pure love of the creatures she studies. Her favourite part of the job has been traveling the world to collect and document species—from desert landscapes to the dense forests of Guyana—where she’s contributed to new discoveries and international research. Back home at the Royal Ontario Museum, she cares for a remarkable array of amphibians and reptiles from across the globe, ensuring each specimen is well documented and available for study by colleagues all over the world. 

Over more than two decades, Amy has helped shape galleries, supported public education, and advanced research on everything from endangered  Desert Tortoises to newly described species. She’s the kind of collections specialist who knows—every single day—that she truly has the coolest job in the world, and she brings that passion to the ROM’s visitors, researchers, and living creatures alike.