The Ringed Map Turtle

The ringed map turtle, Graptemys oculifera, lives almost entirely in the Pearl River and its major tributaries in Mississippi and Louisiana, with one small, separate population found in 2021 in Louisiana's Bogue Falaya, and the one stretch of river formally set aside for it begins at Ratliff Ferry, on the Pearl east of milepost 124 of the Natchez Trace Parkway. In July 1990 the Pearl River Valley Water Supply District set aside about 12 river miles running north from Ratliff Ferry to Lowhead Dam as a sanctuary for the turtle, with signs to be kept up and channel work done by methods that do not harm it. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had listed the species as threatened on December 23, 1986.

The turtle needs two things a wild river channel supplies: logs and snags to bask on, out of reach of predators, and large, high sandbars beside the river to nest in. Map turtles bask more than most aquatic turtles, and the Service notes that basking may be integral to females maturing their eggs, yet ringed map turtles usually abandon their perches when a boat passes and may not return for up to an hour. Females do not mature until about ten years old, likely nest once a year and sometimes skip a year. Marked turtles recaptured in 2008 and 2009 were at least 23.5 years old for males and 30 to 36 for females.

Its decline was blamed on reservoir building, channelization, the removal of snags for navigation, siltation and poor water quality. The recovery plan calls for 150 protected river miles in two reaches on opposite sides of the Ross Barnett Reservoir; the 12-mile sanctuary is still the only stretch set aside for the species. Ratliff Ferry once held one of the densest populations known, about 1,170 turtles per river kilometer in a study published in 1995, but the Service's 2024 review found its count down 69 percent since the late 1980s, and both monitored sites above the reservoir declining.