Posted: 12/27/2012
6:10 pm EST | Updated: 12/27/2012 10:33 pm EST
A
Clemson University student was surprised by his findings this week after
attempting to research the best way to ensure the safety of turtles trying to
cross busy roadways.
Nathan
Weaver, a 22-year-old senior in the School of Agricultural, Forest and
Environmental Sciences, was trying to figure our how to help the turtles in
their risky endeavor, but instead ended up discovering the extent to which some drivers go out of their way to flatten the hapless reptiles,
according to the Associated Press.
"It
was a bit surprising. I've heard of people and from friends who knew people
that ran over turtles. But to see it out here like this was a bit
shocking," Weaver told the AP.
For
his initial experiment, Weaver placed rubber turtles in the middle of a busy
street near the Clemson campus in South Carolina and watched as seven out of
267 cars purposely crushed the fake turtles in the space of an hour.
Read
more about the experiment here.
Weaver's
observations are not necessarily new, however. In July, NASA employee Mark
Rober documented his own, similar experiment measuring the rate motorists tried to run over rubber turtles,
snakes and tarantulas planted on the roadway.
Of
the 1,000 cars Rober watched go by, six percent of drivers went out of their
way to try to hit the rubber animals, which were stationed safely on the
shoulder, Gizmodo reports.
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