Hey ya’ll! Phew, week five is over and out! It’s been getting pretty busy on the island now too. No hatchlings yet, sadly, but they should be arriving this week at the latest. We’ve been crammed for time trying to fence in all the nests, locate Bubbles the turtle with the sonar device, look for nests still, and trap/tag turtles. Days are going by a lot faster with so much to do and not as much time. I tried taking pictures of the turtle traps on the boat, but my camera got wet through the plastic bag I had it in and now the screen isn’t working. I’ll have to ask for pictures from my colleague when he posts his up so I can show what the traps look like.
Something really neat happened this past week though…. We caught a huge snapping turtle! It’s the biggest snapping turtle I’ve ever seen and it wasn’t aggressive at all. It didn’t try to bite a single person and, with his mouth, he could have taken off a finger easily. We caught him in our trap and released him after we took a bunch of pictures of course.
We had a few problems though with the traps this week. Due to the monthly tides, we lost five turtles since the stakes holding the traps up in the water were too short and pulled the net down so that the turtles couldn’t get any air. It was a tough thing to experience, but we learned a valuable lesson about the tides and thankfully we did manage to save a few turtles that we originally thought weren’t going to make it. Mortality isn’t anything you ever want to happen due to a study, since it interferes with the natural life cycles of the populations that we’re trying to monitor.
Next week I’ll be posting telemetry pictures and explaining how we track Bubbles! See ya!
-Tessa Barman
Bug Bite count for week five: 6
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