Environmental stressors on turtles that live near human development include heavy metal contamination. Such contamination in turtles is measured currently by ICP-OES methods, which can be prohibitively expensive if the equipment is not in-house, thus there is a need for a cheaper quantitative or semi-quantitative method for surveying multiple turtle samples. Scutes (shells) from a group of turtles found deceased in traps near JFK airport were used to see if a reliable quantitative or semi-quantitative method using TXRF and/or XRF could be developed to screen the turtles for heavy metal contamination. Turtle scutes are the outermost piece of keratin on a turtle’s shell and removing the scute is painless to the turtle as they are normally shed, so potentially this method could be applied to analysis of living turtles. Initially TXRF was used, as it is a more reliable method than XRF, to examine the turtle scutes. An analytical protocol was developed to prepare samples and the methods were calibrated to accurately quantify the present metals. The samples were also examined by using a portable XRF, which only measures elemental composition on the surface of the scute. Future steps will be to grind the samples into a powder, analyze the powder using the portable XRF, and compare the results to the TXRF and surface XRF spectra.

Determining metal contaminants in turtle scutes through X-ray fluorescence

2019 Fall National Meeting

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