Week Two!

          Hey guys! So I made it through two weeks so far! It hasn’t been easy either. It’s definitely hard to adjust to such a different working lifestyle, but I’m so grateful for this experience and all the skills I will have acquired by the end of August. Yesterday was uber exciting since I got my boating license! I had to take an 8 hour class, but I didn’t even have to drive a boat to get it haha. I don’t think it will come in much use back in Ohio, but it sure will when I get the chance to study coral reefs someday, hopefully in Australia! ;)

            In this blog I wanted to talk about turtle trapping, but I haven’t been able to get on the boat and take any pictures yet. I have taken a few snapshots of us processing the turtle nests though, so I figured I’d load those up this time around. One really exciting thing is that I found my first turtle nest last Friday!! :D I also found another one today and I caught a turtle in the grass along the shoreline. One nest may seem like an unproductive day for me personally, but I’m just now starting to get the hang of this. Overall though, since May 23^rd, we’ve caught a total of 100+ turtles and we’ve found 135 turtle nests! Last year’s group never found any more than that, so this year is looking to be a huge turtle nesting season since we still have a few weeks to go! Now for some pictures!

A turtle nest is found!

            Turtle nests are really hard to find, as I’ve said before. This nest we found here only looked like a little bit of turned up sand and we would have missed it if there weren’t turtle tracks leading to it. When you see a patch of sand that looks disturbed you have to be very careful when digging so as to not puncture one of the eggs if it ends up being a nest. The first sign you have a nest is when you feel the sand cave in while digging, meaning you have located the pocket that the eggs were laid in. After a little more digging a bit of white or pink egg starts to appear and hallelujah! You’ve found a turtle nest!

Lisa taking hardcore data!

Weighing the eggs.

            After digging up all the eggs very carefully, you have to clean all of them off and weigh them. We also record data on the depths of the nest, the exposure to the sun, the area it was found in, GPS coordinates, and any other comments about possible predation or other factors. We can only dig up the nest if the eggs are new though (meaning they have no air pockets) since older nests are more fragile and can’t be moved around a lot. Once the nest has been processed, we place all of the eggs back in the hole as they were before, cover it back up, put a protective fence over top of it, and flag it with a specific number. Then on to find your next nest! It gets pretty exhilarating once you start finding a lot of them.

Putting the eggs back in the hole.

A processed turtle nest.

            Hopefully, I can get pictures of the turtle trapping for next weeks blog and sooner or later the eggs will be hatching so there will be a lot of pictures of that too! See ya!

                                      Tessa :) 

Bug Bite count for week two = 14