William Merritt Chase paintings

William Merritt Chase paintings
William Blake paintings
Calculating Turtle KillsWhile no one has recently attempted to go out and count the total numbers of turtles that are crushed by cars throughout the United States every year, Gibbs decided to make an educated estimate. To do this he considered three main factors: the number of roads in the United States, traffic density and the speed (or lack thereof) with which turtles cross the two-tire-width kill zone of a road (about 5-10 seconds). He found that turtle populations in the Northeast, Southeast and Great Lakes region suffer at least a 10 percent annual kill rate from road kills, and that some of these regions likely have up to 20 percent mortality rates due to traffic encounters. Those rates are high enough, says Gibbs, to seriously deplete turtle populations and could well account for the fact that wood turtles, Blandings turtles and box turtles have nearly vanished from many regions in recent years.