Bubbles in the Bathtub

It's the start of a new turtle season in the northern hemisphere and time to put more satellite tags on sea turtles for the various projects that I am involved in. This week we (myself and Matthew Godfrey and Wendy Cluse of the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission) are on Bald Head Island, North Carolina to continue our investigation of the migratory movements of adult loggerhead turtles. We have deployed 8 tags to date, four in 2003 and another four in 2004. Those projects can be found here:
http://www.seaturtle.org/tracking/index.shtml?project_id=1
and here:
http://www.seaturtle.org/tracking/index.shtml?project_id=25

The 2003 deployment was the very first project on the SEATURTLE.ORG satellite tracking web site.

This year we were able to raise enough funds to deploy four more tags, thanks to the Bald Head Island Conservancy and the Newport Aquarium in Kentucky. There are some folks from the aquarium here to help with and take part in the tag deployment, and we will be counting on the BHIC staff and interns to track down turtles for us to put tags on and also help with the deployment. And Brendan Godley and company of the Marine Turtle Research Group, who are also partners on the project, are with us here in spirit. Lucy Hawkes, one of Brendan's graduate students, is the one that does such a great job keeping the project text and descriptions up to date on the website.

We have not had a great start so far. Everyone is here on the island and ready to go, but we are still waiting for the actual satellite tags. They were manufactured by Sirtrack and shipped from New Zealand. Sirtrack still had my old mailing address, so the tags were shipped to Silver Spring, MD instead of North Carolina. That on top of massive customs delays because of all the new US "security" measures equals no tags. The shipping company assures me that the tags will arrive on Bald Head tomorrow. We'll see happens :)

I hate to make promises about all the cool reporting I am going to do this week in relation to the deployment, mostly because every time I've made similar promises in the past I've not been able to find the time to fulfill them. Suffice to say that I am going to TRY to do some cool things this week. So, keep an eye on this space for a few days and we'll see if I can follow through!

At the very least we will have a new project available online by the end of the week.