Turtles’ shells contain a chemical record of the environment—including highly enriched uranium, an indicator of nuclear weapons development. What can we learn from these accidental archivists?
To find the highly enriched uranium hidden among the normal stuff in each turtle shell sample, Inglis wore a full-body protective suit in a clean room to keepuranium from getting in the way. Inglis describes the samples like a gin and tonic: “The tonic is the natural uranium. If you add lots of natural uranium tonic into your highly enriched uranium gin, you ruin it. If we contaminate our samples with natural uranium, the isotope ratio changes, and we can’t see the signal that we’re looking for.
The team concluded that all four turtles that came from historic nuclear testing or manufacturing sites carried traces of highly enriched uranium. The Sonoran desert tortoise that had never been exposed to nuclear activity was the only one without it. They collected bulk scute samples from three of their turtles, meaning that they could determine whether the turtle took in uranium at some point in its life, but not exactly. But the researchers took things a step further with the Oak Ridge box turtle, looking at changes in uranium isotope concentrations across seven scute layers, marking the seven years of the turtle’s life between 1955 and 1962.
It’s unclear what this contamination meant for the turtles’ health. All of these shells were from long-dead animals preserved in museum archives. The best time to assess the effects of radionuclides on their health would have been while they were alive, says Kristin Berry, a wildlife biologist specializing in desert tortoises at the Western Ecological Research Center, who was not involved in this study.
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