There is absolutely NO truth to the rumors running amok on the interwebs that Apple is in talks with SEATURTLE.ORG to put sea turtle data on Apple's anticipated tablet device expected to be announced tomorrow. We also do not expect the rumored device to be called a SeaPad!

However, SEATURTLE.ORG does run on an Apple Xserve and the website, content and tools are developed almost exclusively on a 15-inch Apple MacBook Pro and a 24-inch iMac. So chances are pretty good that any new Apple device will eventually make it's way to the SEATURTLE.ORG home office, where, it is safe to say, it will be used to save sea turtles.

Posted by Michael Coyne at 01:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As told in Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time", recently overheard on TWiT, and captured on Wikipedia...

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever", said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"

Posted by Michael Coyne at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Interesting question from the Symposum organizers this morning with regard to number of countries registered for the upcoming Sea Turtle Symposium, and number of new countries. Quite interesting answer as well...

Continue reading "Making Friends" »

Posted by Michael Coyne at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I doubt there is anything illegal about posting sea turtle recipes on the internet. But in seems in poor taste to post recipes that include an endangered species.

Does anyone know the rules on this?

I presume the recipes would work just as well with a substitute meat, but they do specifically mention green turtles.

http://recipes.lovetoknow.com/wiki/Green_Sea_Turtle_In_Chafing-dish_Recipe

http://recipes.lovetoknow.com/wiki/Green_Turtle_Soup_Recipe

Found the following in the websites Terms of Service. Could they be considered to be inciting illegal action by posting the recipes?

2. Illegal of other Harmful Use or Access. Contents may not be used for any illegal purpose. You may not access our networks, computers, or Contents in any manner that could damage, disable, overburden, or impair them, or interfere with any other Person’s use and enjoyment. You may not attempt to gain unauthorized access to any Contents, other accounts, computer systems, or networks connected with our sites or Contents. YOU MAY NOT ADD LINKS THAT ARE IRRELEVANT TO THE PURPOSE OF THE SITE AND ITS CONTENT. Any links added to the site automatically carry the "no follow" tag, so that they do not pass page rank, or anything else useful for spammers.

Posted by Michael Coyne at 06:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The internet is abuzz with lots of new social networking and user-generated content sites and tools. Think wikipedia, digg.com, twitter, MySpace, YouTube and a multitude of similar sites. While user-generated content sites like wikipedia have obvious benefits (for example, a wikipedia page usually comes out at the top of almost every web search I run now and it's scary how often the articles contain exactly the information I am looking for), the same is not necessarily apparent of social-networking sites. However, just as with press releases, participation in social networking sites can be an effective means to reach new audiences with your message. In this case, the conservation of sea turtles and their habitats. In the end, the most effective thing we can do to conserve sea turtles is to educate the public. Currently most sea turtle information goes in to niche publications. Imagine the impact you could have getting the "sea turtle message" in front of a million eyeballs at a popular social networking site loaded with people that would otherwise never hear about sea turtles.

So, let's try a little experiment. A story came out yesterday in reference to a new publication by Annette Broderick et al. This story was dugg by a user at digg.com.

Visit the digg post and add your vote.

If we can push the number of diggs up high enough the story will show up on the digg home page and may be featured in their weekly podcast (not for the faint of heart, but with a whole other untapped audience).

Let's put the digg effect in play for sea turtles.

Posted by Michael Coyne at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A humorous combination of sea turtle biology and a movie review :)

http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/entertainment/14001107.htm

I haven't actually seen the movie. Has anyone out there seen it, and what did you think?

Posted by Michael Coyne at 07:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm not sure why but I found the following story particularly compelling:

Dead dolphin creates a stir

Continue reading "Dead dophin creates stir" »

Posted by Michael Coyne at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The ultimate in community building. This is the way things are going:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/index.php?p=2036&tag=nl.e589

The article describes the tools and methods we will use to build truly collaborative communities in the near-future, that will hopefully help (insert your cause here) save the sea turtles.

Posted by Michael Coyne at 04:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Australian courts are going to make distributors of a computer program (Kazaa) responsible for the illegal use of their program by end users.

See:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050905/ap_on_hi_te/australia_kazaa

Does this mean that you and I can be held responsible for any product we create or distribute that ends up being used illegally by someone else?

The US Supreme Court recently ruled similarly against the distribution network Grokster:
http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=12536&hed=Grokster+Loses

So if software makers and/or distributors are responsible for the illegal use of their products by end users, why have they refused to do the same for gun makers? Where is the press on this one?

Definitely stinks of favoritism for and lobbying on the part of the entertainment industry!

Posted by Michael Coyne at 11:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Matthew mentioned in one of his last posts that we recently spent some time in the field together. One thing I noticed was Matthew's abundance of swag. It seemed like he wore a t-shirt from a different sea turtle project every day we were in the field. Sometimes TWO in one day!

All I have are a couple dozen symposium t-shirts and seaturtle.org hats and shirts.

The experience left me feeling... inadequate. I need more swag. Send a t-shirt (sized XL, or L if your sizes run large), or other favorite item, from your sea turtle project or organization. Bonus points for items that can't normally be purchased. I promise I'll wear your swag to all the best meetings :)

Send your swag to:
Michael Coyne
1 Southampton Place
Durham, NC 27705

I am happy to make a trade. If you would like some seaturtle.org swag in return, drop a note in your package and let me know if you'd prefer a baseball cap, bucket cap or t-shirt. If you'd like a t-shirt let me know what size. If you don't have anything to trade, consider making a donation to seaturtle.org and select the swag you would like.

Posted by Michael Coyne at 03:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What does it say about you when you start editing manuscripts with a crayon?

Actually, it was a Crayola™ pencil, so maybe not as bad. In any case, I found myself trying to squeeze in the final review of a manuscript at the kitchen table yesterday morning before taking the kids to the museum of life science. Everybody was distracted having fun and I knew that I ran the risk of disturbing the moment if I actually stood up. The only writing implement I had close at hand was a Crayola™ pencil.

sigh

Posted by Michael Coyne at 01:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The following stories from the news tracker this morning caught my attention.

Poachers massacre protected turtles on Mexico beach
Leading The Charge, Australia - http://www.leadingthecharge.com/stories/news-0057472.html
Synopsis: MEXICO CITY - Mexican poachers bludgeoned and chopped some 80 protected Olive Ridley sea turtles to death for their eggs, believed to be an aphrodisiac, and ... 10-Aug-2005

Turtle Gets A First-Class Ride
WCCO, MN - http://wcco.com/topstories/local_story_222072226.html
Synopsis: ... require that all healthy loggerhead turtles be released into the wild. Only one in 1,000 sea turtle hatchlings make it to adulthood. 10-Aug-2005

The first is about poachers butchering 80 turtles on a beach in Mexico and leaving all of the remains on the beach. They may have taken some parts, but it wasn't clear from the story. The big question is why did they do it? What was the motivation if they weren't doing it for turtle meat, etc? On a nesting beach you don't need to kill turtles to poach the eggs, which is bad enough, but they certainly did not need to hack up the turtles.

The second story is about a turtle hatchling that was taken back to Minnesota by someone vacationing in Florida. I guess the turtle was discovered and an airline has offered to fly it back to Florida (along with a USFWS escort), FIRST CLASS! And the airline (rightly so) takes the opportunity to generate some good PR for itself.

For some reason these two stories really caught my eye and I think serve to highlight the extreme social and economic differences under which people live around the world. Differences that have a large impact on sea turtle conservation. In one case people are butchering turtles for no apparent reason and in another an airline is flying a single small turtle at great expense to be released in to the wild.

Posted by Michael Coyne at 02:50 PM | 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)

Not sure if it was mentioned at the symposium, but a very special thanks goes out to Mark Dodd from Georgia DNR and his staff and Students for bringing Joey the loggerhead sea turtle to the symposium for display. It was no small feat to set-up his tank and fill it will sea water AND take care of Joey each day in front of a very discerning audience.

Joey was a huge hit and even got his picture in a few news stories.

Thanks Mark! And please thank your crew for all of us!

Posted by Michael Coyne at 12:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Lately, whenever my son sees me working on my laptop he asks, "See turtles Daddy?" Which is his way of asking if we can browse through the image library and look at all the turtles. He's only two but already asks me a ton of questions about all of the turtles.

Continue reading "Family Time" »

Posted by Michael Coyne at 08:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Matthew Godfrey's blog, "The World According To Me..." was the second most popular resource on seaturtle.org last month, eclipsing the Marine Turtle Newsletter, the Image Library, and the 25th Sea Turtle Symposium site. The only resource that was more popular was the satellite tracking section which has been at the top almost since it's inception.

(the satellite tracking section received twice as many hits as Matthew did for those keeping track at home)

Posted by Michael Coyne at 07:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A bit distressing to see so few donations on the home page (only 6).

If you like what we are doing here please consider making a donation. We need your help!!!

Posted by Michael Coyne at 05:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There has been a lot of talk about cicadas lately, and they have finally started to come out. These are periodical cicadas that emerge on a 17 year cycle. The cicadas that are emerging this year are from brood X and last appeared in 1987. Since then they have been sitting underground, tapped into the roots of trees, slowly maturing. During the last few days the mature nymphs have started to emerge in this area. They climb a vertical surface: tree, lamp post, blade of grass, you name it, then molt, and you have a winged adult. The adults move up into the tree tops and begin wooing, which pretty much sounds like one of alien space ships from any of the old 1950's sci-fi movies.

For some reason there aren't any in my yard, but I took my kids to a park about a mile away yesterday and they were all over the place. The song is pretty cool and amazingly loud. Even though there aren't any in our yard I can hear them calling pretty clearly from the woods that surround our subdivision.

In any case, they come to mind here because it strikes me that they have taken the whole arribada thing to an extreme. Turtles that nest en masse probably do so as a mechanism to ensure that as many hatchlings survive as possible when they emerge, also en masse. Ideally predators become sated picking off the hatchlings that emerge early allowing more of the late ermergents to survive. And the cicadas do this on a 17-year cycle!

It makes me wonder how many other taxa, or what proportion, have adapted similar strategies to increase the survival of their young? Coral come to mind which spawn syncronously, as do many fish species, like grouper that have spawning aggregations.

Click on the image (couresy of J. Stein Carter from his website) or follow this link to learn more about cicadas.

Posted by Michael Coyne at 11:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It's been a good year for seaturtle.org. We've added a bunch of new resources and and ran our first, and extremely successful, fund drive. Our users really came through and showed how much they appreciate seaturtle.org.

Continue reading "2003 Retrospective" »

Posted by Michael Coyne at 09:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

One of the funniest lines I've heard in a long time...

http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=80682&cid=7106238

What can I say, I guess I'm a geek :)

Read on if I've lost you.

Continue reading ""You can't grep a dead tree"" »

Posted by Michael Coyne at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Do I have them? How else would you explain this blog?

Continue reading "Narcissistic Tendencies?" »

Posted by Michael Coyne at 05:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Got a bit of work done, but wasted most of my time here watching the TV in the bar. There was a two hour car chase involving some yutz going around in circles in downtown LA trying get away from the police.

Quick fact: there were 593 car chases in LA in 1999. Each one ended in the arrest of the person being chased.

Aside from the obvious, what are these people thinking when they run from the police. This seemed relatively tame, but there were any number of occassions when a passer-by could have been injured.

Man am I glad I don't live out here!

Posted by Michael Coyne at 10:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

This story appeared in USATODAY a couple of days ago...

USATODAY.com - Welcome to the Blogosphere

It gives a feel for the breadth of topics that people include in their blogs and the array of uses.

We still have an open invitation to turtlers that are interested in blogging. Let me know and I'll set up an account for you on seaturtle.org. I would really like to see more reports and experiences from the field, but as long as you are a turtler of some kind you are welcome to expound on whatever topic you wish :)

Posted by Michael Coyne at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (2)

It seems like the only time I get to see turtles on the nesting beach is when I am on vacation. Not too bad, certainly makes my vacations exciting.

Continue reading "Turtles on Vacation" »

Posted by Michael Coyne at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The others are acting suspicious... I don't like it.

I think they are out to get me...

Posted by Michael Coyne at 08:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Continue reading "For Manjula" »

Posted by Michael Coyne at 01:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Been a busy boy. Lots of stuff going on and I can't decide what to do next. SEATURTLE.ORG is taking over financial responsibility for the MTN so I've been under the gun to get a new subscription database set-up. Did that. MTSG has two new co-chairs (but it's super secret so I can't say who they are) and have been tweaking that member database and user interface to hopefully prepare for the coming membership overhaul. Also trying to track down e-mail addresses for a slew of members that don't have one in the membership database. Some of them probably don't even have an e-mail address, may not even know what the heck the internet is. Hard for me to imagine. How the heck do they communicate?

So now what? Think I'll go work on my "other" hobby for a bit (which anyone has yet to figure out).

Posted by Michael Coyne at 04:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My last post got me thinking about how I became interested in sea turtles specifically.

Continue reading "Herps to Turtles" »

Posted by Michael Coyne at 05:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I just returned from a visit to the boonies of northeastern Alabama, in the southern US. I was taking my kids down to visit their great-grandmother, it was the first time she has had a chance to see my son.

Continue reading "Herps and things" »

Posted by Michael Coyne at 05:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A recent Houston Chronicle article, among others, noted the first Kemp's ridley nest of the season in Texas. Considering that until recently there were no Kemp's nesting in Texas, this sort of news always gives me hope. There is the general joy and happiness because it is one of many signs that the Kemp's population is recovering. Donna Shaver has been doing a great job of keeping us all up-to-date on the recovery status of Kemp's ridley in Texas (MTN42, MTN70, MTN74, MTN75, MTN82).

Continue reading "Go Kemp's Go!" »

Posted by Michael Coyne at 05:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

There is an activity log that is part of this blog system that records things like when each author logs in, posts new entries, and bad things like when people try to log in to the author section that shouldn't. It also logs terms that visitors search on. Not who does the searching, just the terms they submitted. There have been some quite interesting submissions. Some obvious, some that make you wonder if people really know what site they are on.

Continue reading "Search Terms" »

Posted by Michael Coyne at 11:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Blogging that is. After Matthew and I tried to convince Brendan that he needed to blog, and telling him how easy it was and how little time it takes up, I'm so snowed under myself I can't seem to find the time. I think I have forgotten more blog ideas than I have in my head at the moment.

Continue reading "Harder than it looks..." »

Posted by Michael Coyne at 02:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My wife asked an interesting question before I left for Kuala Lumpur. After hearing me talk about the much lower than usual number of registrations and all of the last minute cancellations, what did I think was the primary reason people weren't coming. I started to answer and realized that I didn't really know. I have heard different reasons from different people, mostly related to expense or safety (because of the current state of affairs in the world or the fact the Malaysia is predominantly muslin country, barely). I'm also guessing that many US goverment employees have had trouble securing permission and/or funding from their agencies to attend (mine wouldn't fund me but did officially allow my travel).

In any case, I would be interested in hearling from folks that would have normally attended the symposium. Why did you decide not to come? Post your answers in the comment field below (or click the comment link). Don't be shy. This could be an interesting exercise and helpful information for future symposia planning.

My personal feeling is that KL certainly isn't any more dangerous than being in Washington DC at the moment. So no concerns there. Malaysia is also very culturally diverse. Great pains seem to be taken here to be culturally sensitive to the large numbers people of mulsim, indian and asian descent. It appears to be as tolerant a place as I have been. The expense gave me a bit of pause, much more will come out of my own pocket than usual, but I think it will be well worth every penny. And it's certainly very cheap once you get here.

Posted by Michael Coyne at 09:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I had just finished feeding my six month old son a tasty meal of rice cereal and strained peas. He was refusing more, but continued to cry. My wife and I were puzzling over what the problem could be. What were we missing? He's usually pretty pleased right after eating. Why the heck was he still crying? (imagine the serious of back-and-forth of two concerned parents)

My three-year old daughter, who was playing with magnets on the fridge, said simply, "He's aggravated", and went right on playing.

I haven't laughed so hard in a long time...

Posted by Michael Coyne at 11:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This has absolutely nothing to do with hairless apes, although that's a topic I want to get back to soon.

Monkey buttons. I love 'em!

"What is a monkey button?", you may ask. A monkey button is my term for any tool, program, script, thingamajig, that let's you essentially push a button to complete some repetitive task. Simplifying an otherwise complicated task into something any monkey can do. The ultimate monkey button is one that doesn't even require a monkey. It just runs itself, going off at some predetermined interval.

To my mind, any repetitive task that can't be automated isn't worth doing :)

Continue reading "Monkey Buttons" »

Posted by Michael Coyne at 09:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

That's what I was going to write about tonight, but then I just discovered Dave Barry's blog and now I'll have to go read that for a while instead. Don't know who Dave Barry is? Do you live under a rock? OK, seriously. He is a humor columnist that I find, well, very humorous. We get a weekly column in our Sunday paper here in Washington DC. I'm guessing there are daily columns, but we don't get the paper everyday. He also has a website. Anyway, funny guy. I could waste a lot of time reading stuff he writes...

Posted by Michael Coyne at 10:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I don't have any better reasons for "ending up with" my tattoos than Matthew does, but I'm not going to apologize. There was a good reason for the first (I think), and it was just sort of inertia from there.

Continue reading "No Apologies" »

Posted by Michael Coyne at 12:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

So Matthew asked me "How come Dewie has elephant feet?". So I asked the FTC (Federal Trade Commission). A kind public servant provided the following reply...

Continue reading "Dewie Revisited" »

Posted by Michael Coyne at 11:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Cool! I just found a reference to seaturtle.org in another blog (ResearchBuzz).

I'm so proud.

Don't worry folks, the novelty will wear off soon...

Posted by Michael Coyne at 01:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was just reading another blog and came across a humorous reference to a new campaign that the US government has started to promote internet safety to kids.

The introductory website is here.

Posted by Michael Coyne at 01:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Thanks for asking. I am still working out the answer. I am talking about the narrower sense of "why am I here", as in on this page, not the "why am I here here". I came across a couple of "blogs" on the web recently and found them very interesting reading. Not that I would go back and read them everyday, but it did get me thinking... I bet a lot of visitors to seaturtle.org would be interested to know what's going on in the minds of turtlers. What do they think about day-to-day? What makes them tick?

So, I have enlisted the aid of a few turtler friends that I find extremely entertaining (take that as you will :) and asked them to pontificate on these pages.

Continue reading "Why am I here...?" »

Posted by Michael Coyne at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)