The world according to me....

Living tags were the elegantly simple creation of John Hendrickson. I've heard about them for years, but I have never seen one in person. That is, until yesterday. In fact, 24 hours ago, I learned how to create living tags on small loggerhead turtles. It is a simple and quick procedure, likely no less painful than injecting a PIT tag or giving them a flipper tag. The idea is to exchange a small piece of plastron and carapace, so that there is a bit of light coloured plastron on the carapace, and a bit of darker carapace on the plastron. Then, as the turtle grows, the transplanted white patch on the carapace will grown with the scute, and over time will be visible as a whitish patch (see this photo of a nesting green turtle that had received a living tag as a hatchling 17 years earlier when it was released from the Cayman Turtle Farm). Living tags have not been tried often with loggerhead turtles, because of the propensity of commesals (barnacles and such) to colonize their carapaces. Obviously, if there are things coverving up the carapace, how can you see if there is a small whitish patch there? However, turtles have a way of surprising all of us who think we have seen everything. Perhaps in just a few decades, one of these turtles will crawl out of the surf on Onslow Beach to nest in the sand, and someone will notice a whitish patch on its carapace.