摘要：Of the roughly 300 known species of living turtles in the world, diamondback terrapins are the only ones ex- clusively adapted to life in the brackish (= variably salty) waters of coastal salt marshes. Terrapins have a very odd geographic distribution, extending along the Atlantic coast of the United States from the northern tip of Cape Cod down to the southernmost tip of Florida (= Key West National Wildlife Refuge) and then around the Gulf coast to somewhere near the Texas/Mexico border. This linear range is several thousand miles long but never more than a few miles wide, and extends from the north temperate zone of North America (where ter- rapins hibernate during the winter) down to the subtrop- ics (where they aestivate, or become inactive, in the summer). This makes them one of the only animals in the world that hibernate in one part of their range and aestivate in another part of it
