After moving to Plymouth in 2023, Kelly Olson had to quickly come to terms with the realities of suburban life.
One reality came in the form of two painted turtles hit by a truck just feet away from her at an intersection near her new home. Living between two marshlands, Olson had noticed that intersection was used heavily by the local turtles, and she had stopped to help the painted turtles cross the street when they met their end.
“They were both still alive, but past the point of being transported or rescued,” Olson said. “It was just an absolutely heartbreaking thing to see.”
The incident inspired Olson and her sister, Katie O’Halloran, to create TurtlTracker, an app that uses AI to track turtle migration and road mortality through citizen science contributions.
The two Burnsville natives said the goals of TurtlTracker are to decrease turtle road mortality by educating users on how to help turtles cross the road and to collect data to create predictive models of turtle migrations by making the turtle tracking process into a game. The gamification comes in the form of naming individual turtles, which are identified by their unique shells, and a leaderboard featuring the top turtle trackers.
One Minnesota turtle expert says it’s OK to move a turtle crossing the road. Annika Hellerud, a University of Minnesota graduate who worked on two studies of turtle mortality, said you can pick up a turtle and move it, as long as you move it in the direction it was already going.
“Don’t move it to where you think it makes more sense,” Hellerud said. “Turtles have like an internal GPS. If you move it back to where it was coming from, it will just immediately cross the road again.”
Most turtles you’ll come across in Minnesota are painted turtles, Hellerud said. They won’t hurt you too badly if they bite you, so there isn’t much to worry about when helping them cross the road, but you should be a bit more careful when handling a snapping turtle.
