Soft shell success
Posted onNovember 18, 2025byJenna Kissel|Fraser Valley Wetlands, Fraser Valley Wetlands Wildlife, News and Events, Western Painted TurtlePhoto: J. Kissel.
What is the Western Painted Turtle Recovery Program? In the wetlands of B.C.’s Fraser Valley, western painted turtles face many challenges, especially as eggs and tiny hatchlings. With no shortage of hungry predators and no care from their parents once they’ve hatched, only a few young turtles survive to become adults. When you add human activity to the mix, the rate of survival can be so low that a population becomes unsustainable. Since 2012, we’ve been working to improve those odds. In addition to protecting nests, we collect eggs from vulnerable turtle nests, artificially incubate them and head-start new hatchlings at our conservation lab located at the Greater Vancouver Zoo, before releasing them back into the wild.
We wear many hats as conservationists… from field researchers to habitat stewards, to animal caretakers to educators. At our western painted turtle lab, this includes acting as medical care providers for our head-started turtles. We monitor the turtles’ health year-round, but the fall is an especially critical time for the year’s hatchlings. In the early years of the turtle program, about 5-10% of hatchlings were affected by “soft shell”, a fatal condition in which hatchlings’ shells become soft due to a metabolic disorder, usually caused by poor diet and lighting. Our turtle husbandry meets world-class standards, so we were confident diet and lighting were not the issue here…. so what was going on?
After investigating the occurrence of soft shell back in 2021-2022, we discovered an intestinal parasite was causing the metabolic disorder. Cryptosporidiosis, a disease caused by Cryptosporidium parasites, was preventing the hatchlings from properly absorbing calcium from their diet. This lead to the softening of their shells as they were instead using calcium from their shells and bones.
Now that we knew the cause of soft shell, we could try to treat it. Our initial treatment trial led to a 95% recovery rate in affected turtles! With such great success we have implemented this treatment prophylactically to all hatchlings and have seen a continuous decrease in mortalities, with less than 1% mortality from soft shell since treatments began. We’ve also seen an increased growth rate across all turtles, suggesting prophylactic medication has treated subclinical crypto infections.
Hatchlings are given anti-parasitic medication orally. This might look like a needle injecting the turtle, but it’s actually not being injected at all. This is the only tool that will allow us to accurately drop liquid medicine into their tiny mouths. Photo: J. Kissel.
So how do we treat these tiny turtles? The hatchlings are given a combination of anti-parasitic medications over the winter, which are administered orally. Because they are so small the dosage for their meds = one mouthful, and some turtles are certainly more cooperative than others!
Jenna Kissel
Conservation Programs Assistant – B.C. Projects
Jenna joined WPC as a conservation programs assistant, supporting the western painted turtle, Oregon spotted frog, and Taylor’s checkerspot butterfly programs. She graduated from the University of Guelph with a BSc in Wildlife Biology and Conservation and has a background in avian husbandry and propagation. She spent several years in spotted owl conservation and is looking forward to continuing her work in endangered species recovery as part of the BC Projects team.
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