Now Sites has begun work on his next project, an effort to preserve giant Amazonian turtles. An avid photographer, Sites meticulously records his forays on film to augment his lectures. If my house caught fire and my family was safe, my slide collection is the first thing I'd grab because it's the only truly irreplaceable item I have. And Sites makes sure slides aren't all his students see. He took three master's candidates and eight undergraduates with him to Mexico for the mesquite lizard study, and because of his connections in Australia was able to send two students to summer field studies with the University of Queensland and the Applied Ecology Research Group in Canberra.
Sites asks rhetorically of the students' weeks spent camping in the wilderness gathering samples.
He hopes to involve students in work with the endangered Amazonian turtle. The 100-pound turtles are being slaughtered at an increasing rate for their meat and eggs, so a Brazilian government agency enlisted Sites to study the turtles' nesting and migration patterns in an effort to preserve the quiet giants. The turtles are colonial nesters that gather in large numbers on the same beaches to lay their eggs, making them easy targets when they lumber out of the muddy Amazon. The government is protecting some of those beaches and allowing Sites to take DNA samples from any hatchlings that don't survive. His preliminary findings indicate that the turtles, which range over a habitat the size of Europe, appear home back to the same region every year to nest.