Analysis of the Growth of the Nova Scotia Blanding’s Turtle

We have determined that the different plastral scutes (rigid sectional plates found on the plastron, the flat shell structure of a turtle’s ”belly”) of Blanding’s turtle grow at different rates, while scute pairs grow homogeneously. Scute width was used as a new growth measurement to model the growth curve of Blanding’s turtle by fitting exponential and polynomial models. We discovered that the Nova Scotia population of Blanding’s turtles follows the Von Bertalanffy model of growth for plastral scutes. In order to determine how population locations and temperature affect the growth of Blanding’s turtle, several statistical modeling techniques are discussed, including linear and non-linear mixed effect models.