This may seem like a very simplistic question, but I have yet to find any convincing answers. Harless and Morlock (1979) has some decent insights about chelonian sensory capabilities that suggest well-developed olfactory and visual capabilities in most Emydids. However, I have only found one paper (Spencer 2002) that explicitly investigated how turtles detect and avoid mammalian predators. Any thoughts?
The only paper that I am aware of which looked at that was King et al. 2008. Discrimination of predatory versus nonpredatory mammals by box turtles, Terrapene carolina.
Thanks, Donny - exactly what I was looking for, and I had not yet seen that paper. Spencer (2002) did a similar scent avoidance trial as part of a larger study and found that Emydura macquari can discriminate between native and non-native predators through olfaction, but your citation is much more helpful.
My only observation was of basking yellow-blotched sawbacks (Graptemys flavimaculata) abandoning their basking structure due to a beaver swimming nearby; presumably they used visual cues to detect the beaver and diving into the water was a safer location. See Selman and Qualls 2011 below (pp. 192-193).
Article Basking Ecology of the Yellow-Blotched Sawback (Graptemys fl...
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