The world according to me....

For those who get to work on ocean coastlines, I think things are simpler. Turtle occurrences, whether nest crawls or stranded turtles, stand out on the rather uncluttered and flat beach landscape. For those who work along inshore coastlines, things are a bit trickier. For instance, this photo is of a marshy expanse of inshore coastline of Ocracoke Island that borders Pamlico Sound in North Carolina. The grass is about 1 meter tall and not tightly distributed, so any objects that float in at high tide or from storm overwash are easily hidden amongst the reeds of grass. On Tuesday, I went with Wendy and Catherine to this area to try to find a loggerhead turtle that was “missing.” Last fall, a satellite transmitter was attached to the carapace of this turtle after it had been removed from a poundnet in neighboring Core Sound, as part of Catherine’s research on migratory behavior of juvenile sea turtles. In January, Catherine received locations from the satellite tag that suggested this turtle was on land on Ocracoke Island. We contacted a volunteer in Ocracoke to check out the location of the last reading from the satellite transmitter. She found a dead turtle but it was much smaller than the one that Catherine has placed the transmitter on. A week later, I took a trip up there and waded through the marshes and found a dolphin skeleton and a dead Kemp’s ridley turtle, but not the loggerhead that Catherine was looking for. By then, Catherine was receiving no more transmissions from this turtle, so we all figured that it was lost. Then, about 10 days ago, Catherine received a single transmission from the transmitter, although it gave no location information (LC Z). That is why we went back to Ocracoke this past week, to look for the missing loggerhead. We found two dead turtles, neither of them were Catherine’s. We did find the exact location of the final transmission that had a latitude and longitude. This is what it looked like:

Unless Catherine starts to receive more signals from the transmitter, the turtle will remain lost.

Posted by Matthew Godfrey at 06:09 PM | Permalink

The white area by the foreceps is a living tag, the purple dot is a temporary mark of nailpolish.

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.

Posted by Matthew Godfrey at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What does Zoe want to do when she visits a beach? Clean up the garbage, of course. So, when we arrived in Tortuguero after the STS, Zoe lost no time in organizing a beach cleanup with several volunteers. After 40 minutes, we managed to fill 8 large garbage bags with trash from a 500m section of the beach. Besides the shoes, combs, straws, and plastic cups that were everywhere, we found some other interesting things:

The CCC has offered to organize regular beach cleanups in 2004, and to dispose of the garbage off-site. Now, the next step is to find some way of solving the solid waste management problem in Tortuguero village....

Posted by Matthew Godfrey at 12:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After the sea turtle symposium in San Jose, some friends and I decided to spend a few days at Tortuguero. There are two options for going there from San Jose: flying or going by bus/boat. We chose the latter, as it was cheaper and gave us more options to see the flora and fauna. We left the hotel in San Jose at 8:15 am, spent several hours on buses until we got to the canals where we took an hour-long boat trip down to the village of Tortuguero. Half-way through the ride, the way was blocked by a huge tree-trunk that spanned the width of the canal. "No problem," said the boat drivers. A few seconds later a huge chain-saw appeared from the front of the boat, and suddenly they were on top of the log with chainsaw blazing, woodchips flying and water spraying. After cutting through the trunk, one last push with the boat was needed to set the two halves moving down the canal, and give us room to pass. Our marvelling at this was cut short by the sudden onset of a rainshower, but the drivers this time produced raincoats that kept us dry all the way to Tortuguero.....

Posted by Matthew Godfrey at 06:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I forgot my camera on the last full day of the Sea Turtle Symposium, so you have to imagine a roomful of people looking at their thumbs.....

The last full day of the International Sea Turtle Symposium is usually a flurry of activity, and includes things such as the Plenary Session, Closing Ceremony, and last-minute side discussions. This year, the annual Marine Turtle Specialist Group meeting also occurred on the last full day, as did the meeting of judges for Best Student Presentation Awards and a keynote address. Unfortunately, I forgot my camera, so I couldn't capture the moment when Nat Frazer asked the audience to regard their thumbs during his talk in the Futures session (everyone complied).

At the end of the day, I realized that I still hadn't spoken with several folks that I wanted to catch up with. My only consolation was that on the following day, I would be travelling to Tortuguero with a small group of people, and I would be able to finally see for myself the famous nesting beach.

Posted by Matthew Godfrey at 08:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)