David trying to return to his natural habitat. Photo by Ree Brennin, August 1999.

Dr. David Galbraith is a biologist by avocation and a herpetologist by accident. During his undergraduate studies in marine biology and zoology at University of Guelph he took a fourth year Animal Evolution course from Dr. Ron Brooks and was hooked. He spent the summer of 1982 as a research assistant in Dr. Brooks' lab, revelling in the wonders of snapping turtles during several eventful weeks of field work at the Wildlife Research Station in Algonquin Park.

David with proud grandparents Alice and Edward in 1960. David credits a gift from his grandparents as starting him off toward a life of science: the magnificent (and very adult) Time-Life Nature Library books of the early 1960s. They gave the set to David when he was 3 years old. Photo by William D. Galbraith, April 1960.

Starting his M.Sc. with Dr. Brooks in the fall of 1982, David spent three years developing new record systems and statistical approaches to analysing the biology of turtle populations. Most of his work focused on new ways of estimating individual age and reconstructing growth patterns using macrophotos and 3-D casts of the turtles' shells made with dental impression materials. These techniques led to new estimates of age at maturity (>16 years) and longevity (>50 years) for female snapping turtles in Algonquin Park and continue to be applied two decades later.

David carried on with his grad work at Queen's University in Kingston, where he again went after important questions about the biology of turtle populations using new techniques. In this case, he used the newly-invented process of DNA fingerprinting to study multiple paternity and male reproductive success in both snapping turtles and wood turtles, under the supervision of Professor Peter T. Boag and Professor Bradley N. White, now Director of the Natural Resources DNA Profiling and Forensics Centre at Trent University.

Dramatic foreshadowing for a herpetologist. Fascinated by all animals, David took care of a boa constrictor in highschool. However, he really didn't pay much attention to reptiles until graduate work. Photo by Larry Knight, May 1976.

Pursuing a life-long commitment to conservation, David was able to shift his focus to conservation biology after the Ph.D. On an NSERC Post-Doctoral Fellowship, he spent two years as the Angus Bellairs Fellow in Herpetology at the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology, University of Kent, Canterbury, England. This time was largely devoted to working with grad students on such exciting projects as mapping genetic diversity among Komodo monitors (Claudio Ciofi, now at Yale) and Aldabra giant tortoises (Sibilla Girardet and Nick Rowe), in partnership with Dr. Mike Bruford of ZSL (now at Cardiff University).

He returned to Canada in May 1993 as the Executive Director and Curator of the Centre for Endangered Reptiles (CER) in Granby, Quebec. Unfortunately funding became unsustainable and the Centre closed in early 1995. David was hired within a month by Royal Botanical Gardens to set up the Canadian Botanical Conservation Network, a new project to link conservation and biodiversity projects with botanical gardens across Canada.

Our hero in the fall of 2002. Photo by Margaret Galbraith.

Since April of 1995 David has been in RBG's Science Department, working full time on conservation biology, sustainable use and biodiversity issues. His title is "Manager of Biodiversity Projects," where he continues to work with public gardens to support both educational programming about conservation and sustainable use of natural resources, and increasing their participation in on-the-ground conservation efforts.

In 2003, David was invited to join the Board of Directors of the Canadian Amphibian and Reptile Conservation Network (CARCNET/RECCAR) and was selected to serve as Chairperson for a period of four years.

In addition to his work at RBG, David holds three adjunct university appointments (at McMaster, Trent and McGill), and is a member of the Amphibians and Reptiles Species Specialist Subcommittee of COSEWIC.

David has been focussing on the relationship between wild populations and the landscapes they inhabit. His students at McMaster University have been using GIS to analyse existing data sets to test for the effects of development on reptile and amphibian populations.

David lists his contributions about turtles as mostly being about our understanding of how whole populations of turtles work. Some of these include:

• Documenting that reproduction doesn't begin in northern populations of snapping turtles until at least 16 years of age, and may continue for 50 years or more. This delayed maturity and long reproductive life indicates that individual females have to try for a long time to reproduce successfully.

• Documenting that multiple paternity takes place within clutches of snapping turtle eggs. We know nearly nothing about the role of males in reproduction in these animals, and usually take them for granted. From the perspective of life-histories and population genetic diversity, this is likely a mistake.

• Studying the process of estimating individual ages of turtles in great detail, and "dissecting" the sources of statistical error in the estimated ages to show that the counts of "rings" or "annuli" on the backs of turtles may not be too bad a method for young animals, but is wildly inaccurate for adults. Not only are older rings harder to count, but there are very large differences in counts produced by different human observers.

• Calculating some of the first "life tables" for free-living turtle populations, and using these to model such effects as the removal of adults or addition of hatchlings. These and other studies have shown that most wild turtle populations cannot sustain harvest of adults for very long, and that addition of hatchlings from "head start" and other programs does not have a very large effect on overall population size.

• Working with empirical information from the captive breeding programs at the Centre for Endangered Reptiles, David calculated that nearly every effort to supplement the numbers in a wild turtle population being "harvested," through artificial means such as head-starting, will be highly expensive. In a turtle population in which individuals have been head-started and then released, reproductive adult females may have cost hundreds of dollars each to produce. It is much more cost effective to stop turtle harvesting all together than expect the "free market" or conventional wildlife management approaches to support natural populations of turtles that are being eaten by humans.

• Working with zoos in Canada and the USA to set up the data for a studbook (captive breeding family tree) for African Spurr-Thighed Tortoises in 1994. The large number of these tortoises in zoos later led to the cancellation of the project.

• Chairing symposia on endangered reptiles and amphibians in Canada in 1993 and 1994 for the Centre for Endangered Reptiles. After the Centre closed in 1995, the Declining Amphibian Population Task Force for Canada (DAPCAN) meeting that year took on much of the important work of the CER symposia. Following the 1995 meeting, DAPCAN underwent changes and re-emerged as CARCNET, the Canadian Amphibian and Reptile Conservation Network. That David would be asked to Chair CARCNET ten years after he started working for the CER is strangely circular.

• Developing a deep admiration, affection and respect for snapping turtles in particular, born of nearly a decade of field work at Dr. Brooks' research project in Algonquin Provincial Park. Here are primordial, elemental beings with brains smaller than their own toenails, able to survive and thrive in complex, sometimes hostile environments for decades. Conducting spectacular migratory voyages covering miles, having individual sex determined by the temperature at which the individual was incubated as an egg, and showing features of their population biology and social organisation that we do not understand, these animals are still mysterious despite their apparent everyday familiarity.