When my sisters and I were little, we occasionally came across box turtles in the woods near our house. We would bring them home and put them in a box with some water and lettuce, watching to see what they would do (usually nothing). When our father came home he invariably made us take the turtle back to the woods, telling us that wild animals shouldn’t be kept as pets – and knowing that we didn’t have any idea how to care for a turtle.
Life in a Shell doesn’t include the natural-history details that would have helped my sisters and me keep box turtles as pets. Instead, Donald Jackson’s book follows his career researching turtle physiology. Because Jackson was a respiratory physiologist, most of the book deals with respiration and associated systems or processes.
The first question Jackson tackles is the puzzle of why aquatic turtles float, instead of...