- July 02, 2026
- By Karen Shih ’09
A month after the University of Maryland’s Commencement exercises, two more terrapins took their first steps into the real world this week.
Tess and Tudo, 9-month-old hatchlings raised in the College of Education, crawled down the wet sand of Poplar Island into the brackish waters of the Chesapeake Bay on Tuesday, cheered on by a crowd of eager Terps.
“The best part for me is how invested and excited the students and the faculty get—it’s the joy of connecting with and raising these turtles,” said Clinical Associate Professor Amy Green, director of UMD’s Center for Science and Technology in Education, who has now raised four cohorts of diamondback terrapins with Clinical Associate Professor Angela Stoltz.
The hatchlings are part of the Terrapin Education Research Partnership, run by the Port of Baltimore, which gives educators across Maryland opportunities to use turtles in their classrooms for a school year. This supports the healthy development of the young terrapins, who get a chance to grow bigger and stronger before being faced with predators in the bay, while increasing the environmental literacy of students. (Diamondback terrapins are labeled as vulnerable on the International Union of Conservation’s Red List.)
Math and science education doctoral students Victoria Fernandez, Khusbu Dalal and Mary Ziegler Zimmerman were the terrapins’ daily caretakers in the Benjamin Building, feeding them turtle food (as much as they could eat in 15 minutes) and cleaning their tank as well as collecting data on growth, food consumed, and water and basking temperatures. Throughout the school year, hundreds of students across the university got hands-on experience with the turtles.
“The terrapins are a great way to build relationships with students and establish community,” said Dalal, who teaches an introductory course for aspiring STEM educators. “It’s a really cool program, because it encourages people to think about the impact humans are having on the environment.”
The Fall 2026 batch of hatchlings at UMD will be part of the new $1.5M Grand Challenges institutional grant for IN-PLACE: Interdisciplinary Network for Place-Based Learning, Action and Community-Engaged EnvironMental Health. “The terrapin program is a great example of community-based partnerships that helps not only rigorous conservation research but also supports meaningful learning around some of the grand challenges related to human accelerated climate change and impacts on native species like the terrapin,” said Green. “I hope these terrapins can bring optimism and hope and a feeling of agency when it comes to making a change.”
Make like a nesting turtle and dig into some photos from this trip:
Green holds an adult female terrapin, tagged and released by scientists on Poplar Island.
Education doctoral student Victoria Fernandez holds Tess. “They are rock stars when it comes to helping with terrapin care,” said Green, noting that the hatchlings started out at the size of a quarter. She calls the turtles “empathy ambassadors” who help students “see the world through their eyes” through assignments like drawing a food web for terrapins that includes the impact of humans on the ecosystem.
More than a dozen Terps board a boat to Poplar Island. Made up mostly of dredged materials from the Chesapeake Bay, it’s now an important conservation site free of mammal predators like raccoons and foxes, allowing turtles and other native species to more successfully lay and hatch eggs. Ohio State University Professor Emeritus Willem Roosenburg, who attended the release, has been monitoring diamondback terrapins there for more than two decades. Each summer, he collects eggs under a Maryland Department of Natural Resources permit and incubates them, then the Maryland Environmental Service (MES)distributes them to TERP classrooms once they hatch.
Julia Moya, a MES environmental outreach specialist on Poplar Island, takes final measurements of the terrapins’ carapace and plastron, weighs the hatchlings and scans their micro chips before release. She also helped lead a tour of the island for the UMD crew, pointing out blue herons, great egrets and bald eagles, as well as terrapin nesting sites.
Provost and Senior Vice President Jennifer King Rice holds a wild adult female terrapin, captured by scientists on Poplar Island for tagging. The UMD crew also got to see a full-grown male and compare their sizes, learning how females are significantly larger. The pair were released after Tess and Tudo.
In addition to Rice, Green and COE students, UMD community members at the release included University Relations Assistant Vice President Jeff Williams and Alumni Association Senior Executive Director Jessica Roberts ’02. Mario Harley, Piscataway tribal member and historian who frequently guest-lectures at UMD, also attended and spoke about the significance of terrapins to Indigenous communities.
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College of Education