The moment we got the call, we knew that it was going to be a WGC....

Whenever there are more boats in the water due to a holiday weekend or some special event, we usually see an increase in the number of reported turtle sightings. Sometimes, the sightings have been of injured turtles that we have been able to intercept and transfer to a rehabilitation center for recovery. Other times, we never see the turtle, no matter how hard we look. Occasionally, we know right from the moment we receive the report, that it will be a Wild Goose Chase (WGC).

Wendy and I had just spent several hours conducting a sea turtle necropsy workshop for 18 people in a small enclosed space, ensuring that we would be covered in turtle splatter and also exuding pungent odors. Wendy then received a second hand report that a boater had seen a sea turtle "struggling" in the water near the HMS Bounty. The HMS Bounty is a replica of the original ship and was moored at the Morehead City Port for a few days as a tourist attraction. We headed over there, wondering how difficult it would be to explain to the beefed-up security surrounding the Bounty that we were responding to a call from someone we don't know about a turtle that we hadn't seen and weren't exactly sure where it was. Amazingly, we were ushered into the area rather quickly, and apparently our story had stirred up interest because when we got out of the truck, several police and security guards approached us and explained that they had seen no turtle during their "perimeter search." Wendy and I stood on the pier and made long, sweeping eye-searches into the waters in front of downtown Morehead City. We saw lots of boats, birds, and interesting waves, but no turtles. We waited for a while, but still no luck. We guessed that someone did see a turtle (they are always around) but perhaps it wasn't injured. We gave up on our search, but were confident that if an injured turtle was indeed in the area, it would be seen by the now-alerted security and police guards. Since then, there have been no calls or reports about this turtle. Of course, this experience doesn't mean that we won't respond to similar reports in the future. Rather, it helps us gauge the type of outcome we can expect when responding to future calls.

Posted by Matthew Godfrey at 10:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's not fear in their eyes, rather it is resignation. That pile of bags looks reminiscent of a similar pile from last year. That's right. Those are bags of flippers collected from dead turtles found in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia and sent to the NOAA-Beaufort lab for preparation and use in the ongoing turtle ageing study. Lisa, Wendy and I were working on "flensing" the flippers; that is, we were stripping skin and flesh to get the humeri. Larisa was also there, in a supporting role (she is not allowed to flense for a while). She didn't complain about the smell too much. Surprisingly, it didn't seem too bad, although at one point Wendy had to open on of the lab doors for air - it seemed as if she always picked those bags with flippers in the nastiest state to work on. I had to leave early so I missed some excitement: when checking all the Kemp's ridley flippers with the magentometer, Lisa found one that read positive. It wasn't a PIT tag so it is likely a coded wire tag inserted way back when the turtle was just a hatchling at the NMFS-Galveston lab.

At least now there is more room in the freezer for new turtle flippers!

Posted by Matthew Godfrey at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)