Wild Green Minute
About
The Wild Green Minute is a short fact file segment exploring Florida's wildlife and wild places.
Produced in collaboration with WKGC-FM Panama City, each episode features one of Florida's wild places, organisms, or other natural phenomena. From river otters to Spanish moss, listen in for a quick bite of natural history.
Scroll down to hear past episodes and learn more!
Episode 5: Turtle Diversity
Anyone who lives here knows that Florida is a special place, but few people realize that turtles play an outsized role in that specialness!
With all its lakes, springs, rivers, uplands, bayous and beaches, Florida possesses a wide variety of potential habitats for turtles to occupy. Maybe that is why, with 40 native species, Florida has more than one in ten kinds of turtle that can be found in the entire world!
Just to name a few:
We have several species of box turtle, named for their hinged shells. When frightened, they pull their limbs in, fold their tail over as a rear guard, and pull the front section of their lower shell shut, frustrating predators’ attempts to get to the tasty treat inside. Box turtles are common in the city of Panama City itself, and, with similar lifespans to the city’s human residents, may be some of our oldest neighbors.
The largest turtle, the leatherback seaturtle, swims Florida’s waters in search of jellyfish prey, and sometimes nests along our shores! Leatherbacks are named for their unusual lack of a bony shell, and can grow to weigh over a thousand pounds! The only reptiles that grow larger are crocodilians like alligators.
The gopher tortoise is Florida’s only native tortoise! Named for their habit of digging burrows across the state’s uplands, gopher tortoises are ecosystem engineers. The burrows they dig provide a home and shelter for over three hundred other species of animal, several of which could not survive without the tortoises’ efforts. The burrows provide shelter from extremes in summer heat and winter cold, as well as from the frequent fires that keep underbrush from becoming overgrown in their habitat. Though gopher tortoises are a fully land-based turtle, they have some ability to swim, or at least float, when necessary for survival, and have somehow made their way to some islands off Florida’s coast.
These are just three of Florida’s many turtle species, each as different and interesting as the last!
Note: This fact file was originally written for broadcast exclusively within Bay County/Panama City, Florida, from the perspective of Rhett Barker.
Episode 4: Panama City Crayfish
Panama City is famous for our beaches and vacation opportunities, but that’s not all that makes our town special. We also have the unusual distinction of possessing our own unique species of crayfish!
The Panama City Crayfish is a small, striped creature native only to Panama City and the immediately surrounding areas. About an inch long, they use their tiny, muscular claws to gather the decomposing organic matter that makes up their diet. They disappear into little tunnels beneath drip-sandcastle mounds during dry periods, digging down to the surficial water table for moisture and waiting for rain.
When the rains come, they favor the shallow edges of temporary ponds and puddles. Enter flowing water, and you leave the Panama City Crayfish behind - predatory fish push them out of most water bodies that don’t dry up for at least part of the year. Pass the puddle’s edge, to about knee-deep, and you’ll enter the domain of the larger stud crayfish, a competing species that mostly edges the Panama City Crayfish out of their favored territory.
There are many crayfish in Florida and across the world, but it’s only in this narrow band of habitat, in this specific type of water, on our little peninsula, where the Panama City crayfish thrives.
Note: This fact file was originally written for broadcast exclusively within Bay County/Panama City, Florida, from the perspective of Rhett Barker.
Episode 3: Steephead Ravines
Florida is not usually the first place that comes to mind when people think of topography but, across the panhandle, an unusual combination of Florida’s characteristic springs and dunes provides just that: steephead ravines!
Steepheads are narrow canyons carved into ancient sand dunes by springs emerging from the surficial aquifer. Sometimes over eighty feet deep, Florida’s steephead ravines formed by several steps.
First, when sea levels were higher, ancient sand dunes formed along what was then the coast. Over time, sea levels fell, but the sand dunes remained, marooned as inland hills.
Next, Florida’s frequent rains soaked through the dunes and accumulated at certain layers to become underground aquifers. This water had to flow somewhere, and eventually some of it emerged at low points on the dunes to form small springs, or “steepheads”.
These springs eroded backwards into the dune, carving the ravines. Shadowy ravine walls and the cool, clear water that carves them have created an unusual ecological community as well.
Many plants which were present in Florida during the last ice age were forced to migrate north as the climate warmed, and are now found as far away as the Appalachian Mountains.
Steepheads’ cool temperatures offered an alternative - the likes of trilliums, some native azalea species, northern hardwood trees, and mountain laurels present thirteen thousand years ago still grow in the shelter of their walls.
To drop into a steephead ravine is to feel at once as though you have entered a world in a bottle, or fallen through a portal to strange underground mountain slopes.
If you’d like to visit a steephead ravine, you can do so by visiting Torreya State Park or the Nature Conservancy’s Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines preserve near Bristol.
Note: This fact file was originally written for broadcast exclusively within Bay County/Panama City, Florida, from the perspective of Rhett Barker.
Episode 2: Pinky the Flamingo
Plastic lawn flamingos are a classic symbol of Florida, but their feathery inspiration has been missing from the state since the colony that once lived in the Everglades was hunted out of existence to supply feathers to the fashion trade in the late 1800’s. However, this may be changing!
Hurricanes don’t just bring wind and water - they often sweep up birds and carry them here from distant shores. This is the likeliest reason that, not long after Hurricane Michael in 2018, flamingo sightings began pouring in from St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge in Wakulla County.
The American flamingo was soon nicknamed “Pinky” for its feather color, which comes from the shrimp and and marine invertebrates that comprise most of the species’s diet. Likely originating in Cuba or the Yucatan Peninsula, both of which have large extant American flamingo populations, Pinky was among the first seen in the state in over a century. But would he stay, and would others follow?
The answer in the years since seems to be: Sort of, and maybe!
Pinky stayed in the area, with a few brief absences, for five years. His solitude was interrupted in 2023 when a handful more flamingos were swept into the area by Hurricane Idalia. Some were dropped in the panhandle, but others were less fortunate and swept all the way into the Midwest. One of these was the victim of what may be the only snapping turtle-flamingo attack in history. It was rescued by a birder who found it there, dragging the stubborn turtle which refused to stop biting its leg.
For his part, Pinky seems to have departed with his fellow flamingos when they took off for more familiar shores. This would be the end of the story, except for one exciting development: in 2024, before any hurricanes could have delivered accidental avian passengers, a flamingo was spotted in St. Marks once again!
Could this be the return of Pinky to his home of five years? And might it signal a more permanent return of living, breathing flamingos to Florida? Only time will tell!
Note: This fact file was originally written for broadcast exclusively within Bay County/Panama City, Florida, from the perspective of Rhett Barker.
Episode 1: Carnivorous Plants
Usually in nature, plants are food for animal appetites, but across the sandy wetlands of the panhandle, these roles reverse as some plants make up for a lack of nutrients in the soil by springing a trap for insect prey.
Pitcher plants are named for their large, vase-shaped leaves which in some species can grow up to three feet tall. These pitchers are filled with water and digestive enzymes, and release a scent that bugs find irresistible. When an unfortunate arthropod flies into the pitcher’s mouth, it finds itself stuck without enough space to take off and unable to climb out because of downward-facing hairs and the slippery pitcher walls, sinking towards a watery grave.
Pitchers aren’t the only plants hunting in Florida’s bogs - pink sundews carpet the moist edges of ditches and ponds, sticky snares waiting to trap any tiny animals unfortunate enough to walk by. Pink sundews grow brilliant pink leaves, covered in globs of glue. When a bug becomes stuck, the sundew slowly curls its leaf around the tasty morsel as it digests.
Even the water isn’t safe, if you are small enough to fall prey to a bladderwort - a carnivorous plant which sucks microorganisms like passing protozoa into oxygen-poor pouches, then suffocates and digests them!
Note: This fact file was originally written for broadcast exclusively within Bay County/Panama City, Florida, from the perspective of Rhett Barker.
