The Players:
Peanut (a juvenile green turtle)
Christian Guerreri (works at the NC Aquarium in Manteo)
Catherine McClellan (Phd student at Duke University)
CC2142 (a sick juvenile loggerhead)
Narrarator (a simple civil servant)

Scene:
Coastal North Carolina, between Nags Head and Hatteras Village

The Action:
The audio version of this play is available here. You will need iTunes or Quicktime installed to be able to access it.

Background:
This is the story of how the lives of a green sea turtle, a loggerhead sea turtle, an aquarium employee, a state biologist, and a graduate student intersect.

Photos of the principal players - as you listen to the audio-blog lined above you can refer to these photos of:

The Emaciated Loggerhead:

Christian Guerreri:
(see page three on this pdf)

Catherine McClellan:
programming the satellite tag:

attaching the satellite tag to Peanut:

The final word:
See here.

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

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of doing fieldwork with Michael Coyne, the creator and webmaster of seaturtle.org. We were in Bald Head Island, in North Carolina, putting satellite tags on female loggerheads that had just finished nesting. Above, Michael is putting on another layer of special epoxy that we use to keep the tag strongly attached to the carapace. It was great spending time on the beach with Michael. Also, it was interesting to watch him multi-task: it seemed like his was always thinking of 3-8 different things at any one time. I guess that helps him continue to be creative and productive.

By the way, this turtle is being tracked on seaturtle.org and you can see her updated tracks here. She is doing something a bit different from other post-nesting loggerheads from the SE USA. For comparison, you can look at the tracks of 12 postnesting loggerheads from nearby Georgia by clicking here.

Posted by Matthew Godfrey at 08:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)