From the morning birds and the squirrels roaming in the day to, eventually, the raccoons coming out at night, a variety of animals call The University of Texas at Austin home. While you can find these critters scattered across campus, another species lives in a centralized location just behind the UT Tower.
The turtle pond appears tranquil, but it is one of the busiest spots on campus. Built in 1939, the pond and its surrounding green space provide a place to study in nature or to simply enjoy watching the turtles while getting a breath of fresh air. Campus tours inevitably find their way past the turtle pond, which houses about 100 of the reptiles, most of them red-eared sliders.
However, it’s not only a space for relaxation. Currently, Justin Havird, an associate professor in the Department of Integrative Biology, is leading a team of students in a research project on the turtles that call the pond their home.
“It’s an opportunity for undergraduates who are interested in ecology and evolution to get some
research experience,” Havird says. “They don’t have a ton of opportunities to work in labs, and this is a way for students to come and do real research in the field and the lab.”
The research project started as a collaboration between Havird and students in the Texas Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior Club. A group from the organization reached out to him in hopes of finding more firsthand research opportunities — possibly at the turtle pond.
Havird was able to get the students started on a research topic that characterizes the turtles’ microbes — creatures too small to see with the naked eye.
“We go out, swab the turtles, extract DNA from those swabs, and then sequence and characterize the DNA to get an idea of what microbes are living in and on the turtles,” Havird says.
While helping the students with the research itself, he also works to get the project the funding it needs. It began with funding from the UT Green Fund from the Office of Sustainability.
“Then the Stengl-Wyer Endowment, the set of funds that’s supposed to promote biodiversity in the College of Natural Sciences, funded us as part of an education grant for the next three years,” Havird says. “We’ll continue to do research at the turtle pond over the next three years to get undergraduate students involved in designing projects, collecting data and writing papers.”
In November 2024, cleaning and repair work started at the turtle pond, which resulted in the relocation of all the turtles to the J.J. Pickle Research Campus. While this posed a problem for Havird and his team, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise for the questions they were trying to answer.
“The whole point of this year’s project is to get this continuous set of data from the same turtle pond,” Havird says. “But it’s actually been really nice because we have this dataset from the semester, and then we have this big impact where all the turtles were moved to Pickle Research Campus, and we’re continuing to sample them in their new habitats. We can see how much that change in the environment is going to impact their microbiomes.”
When the academic year ends, Havird will step down and another faculty member will be in charge of the project. He will still assist the project in whatever direction it goes.
“I certainly have lots of ideas (for research topics), and the students have lots of ideas,” Havird says. “We could do something that’s related to turtle behavior or something that’s related to the genetics of the turtles themselves.”
No matter where the research on the turtle pond goes, there is one aspect to it that Havird wants to maintain.
“I want it to stay with a low barrier to enter where anybody can join and get experience doing this research and gain an appreciation for the natural world,” Havird says. “I love my job because I get to work with an awesome group of diverse and excited students. The best part about working with students is they’re very excited to do stuff. It reminds me of whenever I was younger and was first getting excited about research.”
