Bubbles in the Bathtub

Last night was the third night since we received our satellite tags. The first night after the tags arrived no turtles nested. The second night we had one turtle and put a satellite tag on her. You can follow her movements here.

Last night we got a call from Melissa at the BHIC at about 1:30am. They had a turtle on East Beach on Bald Head Island. Matthew and I headed out in our golf cart. When we got there the turtle had just finished nesting and was making her way down from behind some dead vegetation. The BHIC interns built a box around her when she got to the softer sand.

It was a fairly normal attachment, if you don't count the rain and raging thunder storm that broke out right in the middle. I would have taken pictures, but I had to put my camera in a plastic bag. And of course I forgot to bring a raincoat (as did Matthew), so we ended up huddling behind Melissa and an intern from the Conservancy who did have raincoats.

Below, I thought I'd share Matthew's patented technique for flaring out the epoxy used to attach the satellite transmitters using a simple piece of cardboard.

He says he prefers to use cardboard from Dr. Pepper 12-pack cases.

In any case, the turtle is away and you can follow her progress here.

Posted by Michael Coyne at 12:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

We had no luck the first night after our satellite tags showed up. A turtle did nest, but there was a huge storm in the middle of the night and the beach patrol did not find the nest until morning.

So we broke out the big guns last night. Wendy settled down with a book that had only a few pages left and the rest of us started to watch a movie. It didn't take long before we got a call from the Conservancy that they had found a turtle.

It was a good ways up the beach, about 10 miles, near Fort Fisher, North Carolina, not actually on Bald Head Island. So we had to take an ATV and only a couple of us would fit. So Wendy and myself went and Matthew stayed behind.

By the time we arrived the conservancy interns had already put a box around the turtle and cleaned the barnacles off the carapace.

Everyone helped prep the turtle the rest of the way: sanding down the area where the tag was to be attached; cleaning the area with a bit of acetone; then put down a layer of Power-Fast epoxy and placed the tag, a Kiwisat 101, in the epoxy.

The epoxy was a little runnier than we are used to, and we had to give it extra time to harden. We put on a total of three layers of epoxy. Once the last layer had mostly hardened, we applied marine anti-fouling paint to half of the attachment area. We are hoping that this turtle will re-nest this season and we will be able to get a follow-up photo to see if the anti-fouling paint helps reduce bio-fouling (barnacles, algae, etc). Growth on and around the tag can cover the salt water switch and prevent the satellite tag from transmitting when it is at the surface. We are hoping to find a way to slow down the accumulation of epibionts and hopefully get a little more time out of the tags.

Once the paint was dry enough that it did not come off when touched, we lifted the boards and off she went!!!

The turtle track is already online and you can follow her progress here.

I also made an audio recording of the proceedings which will hopefully go online next week. There is no way I am going to upload it (24+ MB) from the dial-up connection I have here.

Audio Blog (8.2 MB mp3 file)

Posted by Michael Coyne at 04:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So I received notice earlier today that our tags had arrived at the Bald Head Island ferry landing. I let Melissa Hedges, the island naturalist at the Bald Head Island Conservancy, know so that she could help guide them the rest of the way in.

Unfortunately, when she called to check on the package later in the day they said they couldn't find it!!! Argh!

Fortunately everything turned out ok. Apparently, despite the fact that I received a tracking number from DHL, there was an Airborne Express sticker on the box. So there was a bit of confusion as to whether it was the right box. I have no idea which company really delivered it (Just don't use TNT!).

In any case, we quickly set to work getting the tags ready for deployment. The first thing we did was put some anti-fouling paint on the tags (being careful not to paint over the contact label, LED and salt-water switches). I say we, but it was Matthew that painted the tags:

I just checked the satellite pass predictor to see when we will have satellites overhead. Looks like NOAA-14 will be overhead between 9 and 10pm, so we'll turn the tags on then so the Argos system knows the tags aren't in New Zealand anymore.

With any luck we will have at least one turtle nest tonight and can deploy our first tag.

Posted by Michael Coyne at 11:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I received a report a few hours ago that our satellite tags were signed for at the ferry landing. So they apparently have arrived, although I have not seen them yet.

Bald Head Island is an interesting place. There are no proper roads on the island. Everyone gets around on golf carts. And you have to take a ferry to get to the island. So you can see the obvious complications associated with getting packages delivered.

We have folks keeping an eye out for the package and hopefully we will have it in hand within the next few hours...

Keep your fingers crossed!

Posted by Michael Coyne at 08:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, after a series of delays it looks like the satellite tags are nearly here. I mentioned before that TNT passed delivery to DHL. The tags were in Maryland at the time, and it was very disheartening to then see them taken to the DHL sort facility in Wilmington, Ohio. IN THE WRONG DIRECTION!!

But everything seems to be working out now. The package just arrived in Wilmington, NC, about 30 minutes away from Bald Head Island. And only two days later than we were hoping to get them.

Woo-hoo!

Posted by Michael Coyne at 01:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, don't use TNT to ship things internationally. We've not had good luck so far.

The first big issue is that apparently they don't work on weekends. We really need the satellite tags that they are shipping for us (by yesterday). They arrived at JFK last Friday and just sat there all weekend.

Then despite two attempt to update the delivery address, they still attempted to deliver it to my old address!

After realizing that they attempted to deliver the package to the wrong address, they have now handed it off to DHL. Yesterday they told me it would delivered today. Just a few minutes ago they told me it will be delivered tomorrow.

sigh

Posted by Michael Coyne at 05:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Posted by Michael Coyne at 01:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Saw the following story this morning...

Scientists plan to clone turtles by 2010
Malay Mail, Malaysia
http://www.mmail.com.my/Current_News/MM/Monday/National/20050718105458/Article/index_html
Synopsis: ... on turtle cloning has been submitted by SEAFDEC-MFRDMD to the Japanese Government, which supports conservation and enhancement of sea turtles programmes in

Also here:
http://www.nst.com.my/Current_News/NST/Monday/National/20050718093816/Article/indexb_html

From a conservation perspective cloning turtles seems pretty silly. There are a lot of proven and effective conservation techniques that could be employed, and probably for a lot less money (ie public education, nesting beach protection and monitoring, etc). There are even more things, like fishery by-catch reduction, that would be even more effective, but hard to say how the costs compare. If the organizations funding this work were really interested in sea turtle conservation, there are better ways to go about it.

There doesn't seem to be much point in cloning more turtles in to the world unless something is done to reduce existing threats and/or improve the regulatory environment that they live in. The cloned turtles would be subject to all the same threats and would not survive any better than the "natural" turtles.

Posted by Michael Coyne at 03:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)