Pointe - North Carolina Long-Term Sea Turtle Monitoring Project

A project of Seaturtle.org/NCWRC/DUML.

Static Map | Zoom Map | Animated Map (235KB) Adopt this Animal | Subscribe to Project Updates After nesting on Emerald Isle, this turtle headed east, around Cape Lookout, and then moved into deeper waters further off the coast. She then moved slowly southwest, into the Bahamas, and seems to be in the nearshore waters of Andros Island.

Background

Volunteers working in Emerald Isle on the island of Bogue Banks have been monitoring and protecting sea turtle nests since the mid-1980s. On the night of 26/27 June, volunteers with Emerald Isle were notified of a turtle nesting near the eastern regional access in Emerald Isle. After verifying that the turtle was indeed nesting, the volunteers alerted the tagging team, who immediately headed over to the location for tag deployment. Pointe was allowed to finish her nesting and covering behavior, and as she was crawling back to the ocean, the team detained her temporarily by placing the end of two broom handles in the sand, where front flippers meet the body. This allowed the team to clear the turtle's carapace and attach a satellite tag with special epoxy, after which Pointe was allowed to crawl to the ocean. The entire process took <90 minutes.

The Read Lab at the Duke University Marine Lab (in partnership with the University of North Carolina Wilmington and the University of St. Andrews) conducts shipboard and aerial visual surveys for sea turtles, marine mammals and seabirds in the waters offshore North Carolina. To better understand and estimate the abundance of sea turtles in this area we need to gather more information about the amount of time sea turtles spend at the surface (where visual observers can spot them) and beneath the surface (diving and foraging, where they are invisible!). The satellite transmitter on Pointe is a Wildlife Computer’s SPLASH tag and will give us information on her location as well as how much time she spends at different depths and temperatures. From the information we receive about the length and depth of Pointe’s dives we’ll be able to calculate how much time she spends visible and invisible to our observers and we’ll be able to use these data (as well as data collected from other satellite tagged sea turtles) to calculate estimates of the number of sea turtles in the waters offshore North Carolina. Our research is funded by the U.S. Navy.

• The presentation of data here does not constitute publication. All data remain copyright of the project partners. Maps or data on this website may not be used or referenced without the explicit written consent of the data owners.
• For more information please visit the project website.
• This map connects positions generated by the ARGOS system designated as location codes (lc) '3', '2', '1', '0', 'A', 'B'.
• The static maps also shows locations of class 'Z' as small black circles which are not connected by a route line.
• Bathymetry layers are derived from the GEBCO Digital Atlas published by the British Oceanographic Data Centre on behalf of the IOC and IHO, 2003, and the ETOPO2 Global 2' Elevations published by NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center.
• Sea surface temperature is derived from NOAA's GOES Daily Sea Surface Temperature data.

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