Thane Wibbels, Ph.D., professor of biology in theUniversity of Alabama at Birmingham College of Arts and Sciences, used to go out in the wild to catch turtles.

He wrestled 900 large sea-turtles “rodeo style” when he was a doctoral student doing research on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, jumping on their backs to corral them and take blood samples for hormone measurements. At the University of Texas, he scouted turtle nests at Austin’s water purification plant and dug up the eggs.

But the red-eared slider turtles that Wibbels and former UAB doctoral student Kayla Bieser study have an easier source.