Okay. This was a tough call.
I see the head stripes, but I also see the square-ish head shape. When I first saw the turtle honestly it screamed mud turtle. But I looked deeper.
At first I tried an easy undeniable indentifier . . . usually with turtles, the easiest morphological differences between similar turtles in different genuses are scute patterns. But . . . no luck. The carapace scute patterns appear to be indistinuishable. Now . . . mud turtles tend to be lighter than stinkpots, but that varies from turtle to turtle, and pictures can be decieving too . . .
the only SURE way to know is to see the plastron. Mud turtles have a big one . . . musk have a very small one. Which got me thinking . . . I've never ever seen a mud turtle bask on a log. I've seen them cruising the bottom . . . and crossing land for nesting. But never on a log.
Stinkpots, however . . . they LOVE to climb. I've seen stinkpots climb 6ft plus up a leaning tree.
Then came the connection . . . the reason they can climb is that small plastron. They have so much more arm movement that they can grip logs that other turtles would teeter right off of. If you look at the pictures . . . that turtle is leaning sideways on the log and hugging it like a baby hugs her teddy bear. Check this out:
See how the (adult) mud turtle's plastron is almost the same width as the carapace? There's no way a mud turtle could hug a tree like that . . . their downward arm motion is severely limited by width of that plastron.
Now--unless that shot was taken a millisecond before that turtle FELL (not jumped) in the water . . . its totally a stinkpot. There's also another clue . . . Sternotherus (musk) turtles have "barbells" on the chin and neck . . . which you can almost make out . . . Kinosternon (mud) don't.
Now i still could be wrong cause its really a tough call. But i'm 95% sure its a musk turtle.
-Bob
