Buffalo Zoo’s Brad Poynter attends international turtle conservation symposium in Mexico

Working together to save wildlife is something the Buffalo Zoo takes pride in, and that crucial part of our mission recently sent one of our curators to Mexico.

Brad Poynter, the Buffalo Zoo’s Curator of Animal Operations, traveled to Guadalajara last month to attend the Symposium on the Conservation and Biology of Tortoises and Freshwater Turtles.

The annual conference, which Poynter has attended on numerous occasions, allowed him to connect with fellow turtle experts and learn new information that benefits the Buffalo Zoo’s conservation efforts. The symposium is hosted by the Turtle Survival Alliance in conjunction with the International Union for Conservation of Nature Tortoise and Freshwater Turtles Group.

“It’s a trip I try to do annually,” Poynter said. “I’ve been a member of the specialist group for about 20 years. It was good to meet people in Mexico that I’ve only had email contact with.”

The symposium was made up of freshwater turtle and tortoise specialists from around the world, including field biologists, university professors and zoo staff. Attendees are able to host presentations on the conservation and research work they’ve been doing, and allows for plenty of other discussions about both progress and possible threats to the animals.

In the case of the Buffalo Zoo, Poynter and our staff have been hard at work with our population of Mexican Cora mud turtles, a critically endangered species that was only discovered within the past few years.

Through the symposium, Poynter was able to have discussions with the field biologist who first described the species and staff from the Guadalajara Zoo that deal with the Cora mud turtle’s sister species, the Vallarta mud turtle.

Poynter was able to learn techniques the Guadalajara Zoo are using for successful breeding and hatching of the Vallarta mud turtles, and the hope is that those same practices could be successful with the Cora mud turtles.

“They’re still learning what all the mechanisms are, but have had some successful breeding,” Poynter said. “Hopefully, this year, we’ll be implementing some of those strategies that we learned from Guadalajara.”

The Buffalo Zoo’s Cora mud turtle population continues to do well. The turtles are very reclusive, according to Poynter, and spend much of their time buried in the soil within their behind-the-scenes habitat.

“We are trying to be hands off with them and see what they do,” Poynter said. “Hopefully by doing so, we’ll yield a high production of eggs.”

The hope is that the Zoo can successfully hatch eggs from the turtles to add to our assurance population, with the long-term goal of reintroducing them to the wild and giving further life to a species on the brink of extinction.