The world according to me....

Spot the hatchling

Lots of loggerhead hatchlings are emerging from their nests now in North Carolina. Several days after emergence, the project volunteers excavate the nests to calculate success and to liberate any live stragglers in the nest cavity. It is also an excellent opportunity to raise awareness and provide information about sea turtles to the public. In this particular nest, there were only two live hatchlings remaining in the nest. No matter, enthusiasm was high and everyone remained at the water's edge to ensure that both turtles made it into the surf.

This is but one of the many different kinds of situations where people and turltes interact in North Carolina. In future blogs I hope to highlight some of the other interesting iterations.

Posted by Matthew Godfrey at 07:41 AM | Permalink

Sometimes, people say the most interesting things....

A few weeks ago, Wendy, Larisa and I were lucky enough to conduct a necropsy on a dead loggerhead turtle with some schoolkids who wanted to learn more about coastal marine ecology. They were all motivated enough to put up with the pungent odors produced by our specimen, which was already impressive. The questions they asked and the ideas they expressed were quite remarkable. My favorite statement of the day came from one of the kids who was talking about the different species of sea turltes. I asked him to name them all, and he had trouble recalling leatherbacks. I tried prompting him by saying that the forgotten species looked a bit different than the other ones. "Oh, now I remember!" he cried. "Leatherbacks! They look like watermelons."

Posted by Matthew Godfrey at 10:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Kemp's ridley sea turtles usually nest exclusively in the Gulf of Mexico, mainly on beaches in Mexico and also in Texas. When they are not nesting, Kemp's ridley turtles often migrate across the Gulf of Mexico and up along the eastern seaboard of the USA to feed (see range map here). Here in North Carolina, juvenile Kemp's ridleys are often seen in both offshore and inshore waters, and many sick or injured individuals have been treated at the Karen Beasley Sea Turtle Rehabilitation Center. In contrast, adult Kemp's ridley turtles are a rarity in North Carolina. So it was with some surprise that in June 2003 a nesting female Kemp's ridley was discovered nesting on the beach near Cape Lookout in North Carolina. The turtle was laying its eggs in the middle of the day, a normal behavior for this species. The nest emerged recently and the nest inventory revealed that 73 out of 80 eggs total produced hatchlings. Two live turtles were still in the nest and were released to scramble to the ocean. This is not the first time that Kemp's ridleys have nested in the Carolinas, and perhaps it is not the last.

Thanks to Lisa Presley for the photo.

Posted by Matthew Godfrey at 08:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Take a look at that small turtle that Larisa found last Friday while out checking pound nets for turtles in Core Sound, North Carolina. She said it was the smallest loggerhead she had seen in inshore waters. It also had a flipper tag with an unfamiliar start to its 6 digit alpha-numeric code: SSS. We all were thinking that maybe it came from the Azores or Madeira Island in the East Atlantic. It turns out that it was released in Florida one month ago after being reared in captivity in Texas. It also had an older carapace wound, so we delivered it to the Karen Beasley Sea Turtle Rehabilitation Center on Topsail Island, where it will be treated and eventually released when it is fully recovered from its injury.

Posted by Matthew Godfrey at 04:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I found this photo wedged in the back of a drawer of an old desk that I scavanged from the NOAA-Beaufort lab on the day they were cleaning out some old storage space. There were some other photos with this one, although not of turtles. Judging from the style of clothes and haircuts of people in the other photos, I think they were taken in the late 1960s.

It is difficult to gauge the size of the loggerhead in this photo. What strikes me is the relatively low number of barnacles on its carapace. I have the impression that most of the loggerheads I see have many more barnacles than this one. Then again I mostly see sick, injured or dead stranded turtles who may be most susceptible to colonization by epibionts than healthier turtles. There is also the possibility that this photo was taken elsewhere, perhaps even another ocean basin.

Posted by Matthew Godfrey at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)