The world according to me....

Not only leatherback turtles get tagged in the rear flippers. Some hardshelled sea turtles also get them, particularly juveniles and subadults that are incidentally caught and released. Some of these turtles will inevitably start to nest someday, so for those of you patrolling nesting beaches at night, you might want to check the rear flippers for tags (although this is not as easy as checking front flippers). All stranded turtles should also be checked for rear flipper tags. This applies to everyone in the Atlantic working on turtles, and perhaps elsewhere, as juvenile turtles can make transoceanic and transequatorial migrations

Posted by Matthew Godfrey at 05:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Many projects start out this way:

Many projects start out this way: a few folks (in this case, Joanne Harcke, Craig Harms and Catherine McClellan) sitting around a table, throwing ideas around. Little do they know that once the project is formulated and gets underway, there is no more relaxing, no more sitting around, no more “what if?” discussions. Instead, there will be lots of hard work, including dealing with the inevitable unexpected developments. But that is what makes research projects so exciting: the unknown and the unanticipated. It would be deadly boring if we always knew what was going to happen…

Stay tuned for more.

Posted by Matthew Godfrey at 09:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For starters....
please add more in the comments section

The smallest turtle apparently is the Nama Padloper, Homopus bergeri, which is about 7-8 cm long when mature. They are thought to lay single-egg clutches.

An adult albino (or amelanistic) loggerhead was observed nesting in Australia in the 1970s.

There are annual turtle races in different parts of the world. For instance, there is one in North Dakota.

One species of turtle, the northern long-necked turtle of Australia (Chelodina rugosa), lays its eggs under water. Incubation begins only after the water recedes and eggs are no longer submerged.

A blind olive ridley sea turtle was observed nesting during an arribada in Ostional, Costa Rica, in the early 1980s.

Posted by Matthew Godfrey at 01:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

This is pretty much what it seems: several people working together to free a leatherback that had been accidentally tangled in a small gillnet set close to shore. It was just a matter of cutting the remaining line wrapped around her flipper before she was able to swim away freely.

However, there is some background to this. To begin with, this turtle was originally 30-40 meters off shore when she was spotted by some beach tourists, who then alerted us. Stephanie Kamel and I decided we should swim out to see what we could do. Fortunately, Stephanie is an olympic-type swimmer, because once we got out there, I was having trouble keeping my head above water, let alone deal with an entangled leatherback. Somehow, after about 20 minutes of struggling, Stephanie dragged both the turtle and me back to shore. There, in the shallows, as much as we tried to unwrap the line from the turtle, she kept swatting her flippers and re-entangling herself. Finally, the tourists who had been watching plus Christophe (another turtle worker) jumped in to try to keep the turtle calm while we worked to cut the ropes and lines. In the end, the turtle was freed and she swam away energetically.

From then on, I learned to either take a boat out or wait for the tide to fall before trying to free an entangled leatherback. It was invariably better for all parties involved. I remember once waiting until low tide to free a leatherback that had been wrapped in a boat line for several hours, upon which she proceeded to haul out onto the beach and start preparing the sand for a nest cavity. It is hard to compete with that kind of dedication.

Thanks to N. Mrosovsky for taking the photo.

Posted by Matthew Godfrey at 02:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When you find a dead turtle on the beach, one of the first questions asked is also one of the most difficult to answer: What was the cause of death? Although sometimes the cause is obvious (e.g. a billfish strike), oftentimes there is no clear external sign of cause of mortality. Opening the carcass and doing a rough necropsy can sometimes uncover the reason of death, such as an intestinal blockage. However, more often than not, there is no apparent anomaly visible in the body cavity. But how does that answer the original question?

In fact, it is often easier to say what did NOT kill the turtle. By process of elimination, you can usually identify a few likely causes of death. Although still ambiguous, it may be a start, particularly if you find several stranded turtles in similar conditions and similar circumstances around the same time and in the same area. By looking for similarities across cases, and looking for correlations with other external factors, it may be possible to identify the most likely agent(s) of mortality. All this is just more reason for starting and maintaining long-term databases on sea turtle stranding events.

Posted by Matthew Godfrey at 09:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)