The world according to me....

The direction of sexual differentiation in sea turtles is dependent on temperature. Cooler incubation temperatures produce males, warmer temperatures produce females, and at “pivotal temperature” equal numbers of both sexes result. Because of this, the monitoring of sand temperatures on nesting beaches has become routine in sea turtle projects. Well, almost routine. Ideally, you bury your automatic dataloggers in the sand at the beginning of the season, you dig them up at the end, and you download the data collected to your computer. Most people (including me) use triangulation to record the exact location that the dataloggers are buried, but sometimes….

Once I lost some dataloggers because the landmarks I used for triangulation were not as permanent as I thought: the old rusting car frame was mysteriously hauled away and the dead coconut tree fell over in a heavy thunderstorm. In another case, subsequently nesting leatherbacks dug up the nests and flung the eggs (and dataloggers) into the sea. And in the most recent case, the “permanent” location markers were carefully removed from mid-beach and laid on a nearby berm. Fortunately, my two co-workers dug and raked sand for two days to find the dataloggers. The data from one of them are shown in the graph.