The turtle ponds at UT Austin are both a sort of secret and a standout.
They are in a quiet pocket north of UT’s iconic tower, a place usually bustling with activity.
“For me, it’s kind of like how I guess New Yorkers would feel about the Central Park where it’s like in the middle of like a jungle of just concrete. You find this, like, little nice oasis of just like nature,” said UT Austin third-year RTF student Thang Tran. “And it’s really nice to just sit here and be in the space.”
Dan Cook, executive director of planning, design and construction at UT, said the turtle pond “is my family’s favorite place on campus.”
Cook is currently leading a project at the ponds that has them nearly empty of water – and completely empty of turtles.
“Yeah, we knew it would get folks’ attention,” Cook said.
That’s why UT put up big orange signs along the tall, temporary fence now surrounding the four little connected swimming pools. The signs address the big question: Where are the turtles?
“I was a little curious as to what was going to happen to the turtles,” Tran said.
Where are the turtles?
“The turtles are currently on vacation, and they’re up at some ponds that we have up at the Pickle Research Campus,” said Travis LaDuc, curator of herpetology at the Biodiversity Collections at UT.
The UT Austin Pickle Research Campus ponds aren’t really a publicly accessible oasis like the ones at the main campus. And actually, they don’t usually even house turtles.
But during construction, they have 100 turtles that a crew pulled out of the main campus ponds a few weeks ago.
“We had a small little army of about eight or so students, myself and another faculty member,” LaDuc said. “And we’re out with dip nets walking along the edge, also jumping in the water with waders and grabbing these turtles by hand. And that first day we pulled out 60 turtles.”
The other 40 quickly caught onto the situation and weren’t quite so easy to catch.
“The really mucky part came the next two nights when they brought in a crew to start removing sediment,” LaDuc said. “And once they removed the water and some of the sediment, we were able to get the remaining turtles.”