The world according to me....

This is Wendy taking a digital photo of a dead stranded loggerhead turtle on Harker's Island. This particular turtle looked like it had been hit by a boat. Around this time of year, there are many reported stranded turtles in North Carolina, and usually Wendy or I respond to them individually. On this particular day, we responded together because: a) it was a beautiful day for visiting Harker's Island; b) we didn't know how fresh it was and thought we might have to bring it back for a special necropsy; and c) it is simply just nice to take a ride with Wendy. When we got there, the turtle had already been painted orange, which indicated that the rangers from Cape Lookout National Seashore had already recorded it and were planning on coming back later to take samples. This in turn meant that we didn't have to do anything except look and take photos. Since then, Wendy has been driving around all over the coast to respond to stranded turtles. Today she left for Topsail Island for a fresh dead loggerhead, and on her way back she will stop at the Coast Guard station in Emerald Isle to pick up a dead sea turtle they found floating not far from Bogue Inlet. It is just that time of year.

Posted by Matthew Godfrey at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last Sunday, I received a call from Wendy, who was on Bald Head Island, that there was an injured turtle in Bogue Sound, in Morehead City. She gave me the cell phone number of the person who called in the observation. I called the number and was soon speaking to a woman on a small boat who had observed a turtle being struck by another boat. The woman had been able to slowly coax the floating turtle closer to shore. I quickly drove near to where she said she was, and after some walking around, I found the homeowner who allowed me to go into his backyard and onto his private dock next to which the turtle was floating. The water was murky and looked deep, so I carefully lowered myself down the pilings. When I finally let go, I was surprised to find that the water was only 1 meter deep, so it wasn't necessary for me to have lowered myself down the pilings in the first place. I was able to walk through the water and grab the turtle, who didn't put up much resistance (she had three lacerations from a boat propeller, including one over the top of her eye). The woman and her husband helped me carry the turtle to my truck, then I drove off intending to go directly to the Topsail Turtle Rehabilitation Center. However, my calf was stinging and I looked down and saw blood pooling in my sandal: I had been cut by barnacles and oysters on the pier pilings. I needed to go home first and clean myself up. I was on the road again within 20 minutes. AfterI had delivered the turtle (now named Morehead) to the Topsail Rehabilitation Center and the turtle had been stabilized, the attention turned to me and my leg. I am proud to say that I myself have been treated at the sea turtle hospital, and sure enough the cuts are healing nicely.

Posted by Matthew Godfrey at 04:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Responding to dead stranded turtles is a major part of our job here in North Carolina. We collect basic information from the turtles, including location, size, condition, possible cause of death, sex and stomach contents. We also have a suite of samples to be collected for various researchers, depending on the species of the stranded turtle, whether or not it had been previously tagged, and also likely cause of death (e.g. if it appears to be diseased). The most commonly collected samples are flippers and eyeballs. Both go to the Ageing Project of the Cetacean and Sea Turtle team at the NOAA-Beaufort Lab. There, Larisa Avens and Lisa Goshe (above) use various histological procedures to process the bones in the eyes and flippers, with the ultimate goal of trying to determine the age of the turtles. The work they do is amazing, and appears to be a promising method to definitively determine how old a turtle is at the time it died. It is also good knowing that samples from stranded turtles are contributing to increased knowledge about sea turtles.

Posted by Matthew Godfrey at 07:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is a group of engineers from NCSU who wanted to work on a project that had a different angle to it. They selected a proposal to develop a remote system to monitor an incubating sea turtle nest that could not only record incubation temperature and movement of eggs or hatchlings (signaling when the eggs hatch), but also warn of impending water inundation and predator disturbance. They worked long and hard to develop a system, working with various engineers and biologists, and eventually came up with a prototype that they wanted to install on a nesting beach. Unfortunately, the start of nesting has been slow this season, so they had to place the equipment simply in the sand on Atlantic Beach in North Carolina. Nevertheless, it was instructive for them, as one can never fully anticipate all the potential bugs associated with moving from laboratory to field. Despite a few minor glitches, hopes are high that modifications can be easily made and we can field-test a new iteration of this unit.

Posted by Matthew Godfrey at 03:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)