Fred Caporaso has been the butt of countless turtle soup jokes. With the combination of a doctorate in food science and a passion for saving endangered turtles from being eaten, the irony is hard to miss.

Caporaso, a food science professor, uses his passion for turtles as a teaching tool in nearly all of his courses. The animals act as an effective aid for teaching evolution by observing how different species have adapted and by observing how turtles catch their prey, he said.

“You can answer big questions working with small animals,” said Caporaso.

Caporaso never intended to be a turtle expert. He was attracted to dinosaurs as a child, but his interest went no further until graduate school at Pennsylvania State, he said. During graduate school, he found a journal on turtles in the library and ended up reading the whole thing.

“I always had an interest in turtles as a kid,” said Caporaso. “[I call it] a genetic defect.”

When he came to Chapman 27 years ago as chairman of the food science department, turtles had left his mind once again until Ben Dial, a fellow science professor, rejuvenated his interest. Caporaso and Dial began studying turtles at Chapman to determine why they evolve to have long necks that don’t fully retract into their shells. It wasn’t long before zoos were giving him long-necked turtles to study, and turtles eventually turned into a passion, he said.

The turtle soup jokes became began reoccurring around 2001 when Caporaso’s focus turned from studying turtles to saving them from consumption in China. Two of the species of turtle he studied are now extinct in the wild.

“It wasn’t any grand master plan at all. It was really serendipitous,” said Caporaso.

In 1994, Caporaso became inspired to use turtles in the classroom thanks to Steve Irwin, “The Crocodile Hunter.”

Caporaso traveled to Australia to study turtles and visit fellow turtle researcher John Cann. The two went to Irwin’s reptile park in Queensland because Irwin was local and could lead them to turtles, according to Caporaso.

From then on, the Irwin story became something Caporaso told every one of his classes.

“What I found was [mentioning Irwin] was like this magic thing to college students,” he said.

Later, when Irwin’s TV program proved successful, Caporaso was impressed by how Irwin educated his audience using live animals and decided to adopt the same teaching method. When Caporaso started bringing turtles to class, the students’ excitement was greater than he expected.

“Even if one urinates on the floor, everyone gets excited about it,” said Caporaso.

Caporaso had kept his collection of turtles low-key, he said. Since the mid-1990s, they lived out of the spotlight and on the roof of Hashinger Science Center, which requires a key to access. He would cart the animals down to his classroom when he used them.

A few years ago, Caporaso moved the turtles off campus when Chapman began expanding Hashinger Science Center, he said. They now live in a 2,000-square-foot greenhouse in Orange, but he is still able to bring them to class as visual teaching aids.

“Instead of reading about genetic variations and evolution, you can see it happening with the turtles,” said freshman Hannah Huvard, a student in Caporaso’s freshman foundations course.

The turtles Caporaso uses are all aquatic and mostly long-necked species. Other than using them to demonstrate how species adapt and survive through evolution, he also uses turtles in his food science classes to show how they find and capture prey.

This semester Huvard and her classmates participated in an experiment in which they observed how different species of turtles react to live fish. After noticing how protective Caporaso was over some of the rarer turtles, Huvard began to appreciate the opportunity she was getting.

“When’s the next time you’re going to be able to hold an endangered species?” she said.

Turtles are also a major part of Caporaso’s summer Galapagos Islands travel course. He takes students to visit more than 10 islands in one week, four on which Darwin studied evolution. During part of the course, Caporaso has the students study the difference among species of giant tortoises that come from various islands.

“[It was] once in a lifetime. … We saw some things that hardly anybody ever sees,” said junior Lindsey Clopp, who took the travel course last summer.

“People always ask, ‘why turtles?’” said Caporaso.

He points out that Darwin spent a large chunk of his life studying earthworms, and eight years studying barnacles. Although Caporaso became a turtle expert by accident, taking a similar approach as Darwin’s has made him a better teacher.

“Sometimes it’s good to follow your curiosity,” he said.


Contact this reporter: tyler.mccusker@thepantheronline.com