Larisa Avens

Every once in a while, a day at work turns out to be particularly peculiar. Take this past Wednesday, for example…
After our lab’s cetacean and sea turtle team works up stranded marine mammals and/or extracts samples from stranded sea turtle parts for research, we have lots of pieces/parts left over that have to be disposed of and lately it has been a problem to figure out how to get rid of the stuff. The solution this time was that personnel at Cape Lookout National Seashore offered to take two of us and the frozen containers of parts out a couple of miles offshore so that we could dump it and let it re-enter the food chain. In return, however, we were to allow the park to temporarily store a bunch of antique furniture in our walk-in freezer to rid the furniture of termites…this is the same, stinky freezer that houses all of our marine mammal and sea turtle parts and carcasses!

So, the first part of the day was spent loading hundreds of pounds of stinky turtle and dolphin pieces onto a boat, driving offshore, and then trying to dump the still half-frozen parts overboard. Please note that when hundred-pound blocks of frozen muscle/blubber/bone hit the water after falling a few feet, they send up a bloody back-splash that has the capacity to coat not only the ‘dumpers’, but also the entire side of what was once a nice, clean, 25-foot boat. After the dumping was complete, we then transported two truck-loads of fragile, termite-ridden furniture that was falling apart to our laboratory and then spent a quite a bit of time trying to fit all of it into our already-full storage freezer. It was like a bizarre game of Tetris...turning furniture around and around to figure out how it could be stacked and packed most closely together. Check out the results:

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Continue reading "Hold the mayo?" »

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A few weeks ago, when Matthew and I were fishing for turtles out on Core Sound in North Carolina, this awe-inspiring squall line overtook us. None of us had ever seen a cloud formation quite like this one and fortunately, Matthew was able to take a picture of it. It has an ominous quality that makes it look like it could serve as a backdrop for the riders of the Apocalypse or some equally dread occurrence. As the squall hit, we tied off the boat to ride out the storm and during that time we had the chance to discuss the worst weather experiences we'd ever had. Going through my mental list - being in a trailer that was hit by lightning, witnessing a ball of lightning that burst through a friend's phone jack and briefly hovered in her living room, and excavating turtle nests on a beach as small funnel clouds occasionally appeared from the low clouds above and then were sucked back up - I started wondering how turtles (and, I guess, large aquatic animals in general) perceive such storm events. Can they sense the approach of a storm? Do they duck and cover when it hits, observing the light show from a secure location on or near the bottom? Or do they just continue to go about their turtle business, having their activities occasionally illuminated by flashes of lightning?

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Leonard, the 75-year old pound net fishermen who works with us to catch sea turtles here in North Carolina, has some very interesting theories about sea turtle behavior. He has often told us that, “if a loggerhead gets a-hold of you, he won’t let go ‘til it thunders”. At the time he first told me this, what I had seen of loggerhead behavior didn’t give me the impression that it was necessarily true. So, I mentally filed the information away as another piece of ‘Down East’ North Carolina folklore.

Then, I met loggerhead XXN184.

From the time XXN184 came on board the fishing skiff, this mid-sized juvenile was on a rampage, tearing up everything in the bottom of the boat. Attempts to take blood samples were repeatedly thwarted as the turtle bucked like a bronco and crawled unceasingly around on the deck. Still, I needed loggerheads for my behavioral experiments, so I brought the turtle back to the lab.

The next day, while attempting to take XXN184 out of my experimental arena, I got the chance to test Leonard’s theory. Imagine the following scenario: The arena was 5 feet tall and filled with 2 and a half feet of water, so to get XXN184 out I had to lift the 33 kilo (74 pound) turtle up to shoulder-level, climb up on a step-stool, and place the turtle into a holding container just over the edge of the tank. As I was standing with one foot on the ladder and one leg over the side of the tank with XXN184 resting on the edge, the turtle suddenly pushed itself around and bit down hard on my inner thigh. For the next few minutes (although it seemed like much longer than that), the turtle squinched its eyes shut and chewed on my leg, never showing any sign of letting go. In fact, I was only able to get XXN184 off my leg by pulling the turtle away each time it readjusted its grip. Needless to say, by that point, I was praying for thunder but there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

See below for the end result...thanks to a sturdy pair of waders, it was a lot better than it could have been!

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Matthew’s reference to the imminent presence of hatchlings on the beaches makes me think of the remarkable programming present in each, individual hatchling that emerges from the nest. For me, the single-minded, ceaseless activity of hatchlings during the frenzy period is a constant source of amazement. When working for a few summers relocating hundreds of loggerhead nests to hatcheries and subsequently releasing the hatchlings during night work, the sounds of their constant activity even seemed to become part of my subconscious. When trying to get a few hours’ sleep between releases, it seemed I could still hear little hatchling claws continuously scraping up against the sides of the hatchery, or the sides of the buckets into which we placed them for transport to release sites. And when I closed my eyes to try to sleep, all I saw were little hatchlings marching in ceaseless motion across the inside of my eyelids. . .

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