Turtle Captures

Once a week we capture both green and hawksbill turtles for tagging and monitoring.

To catch green turtles, we hang carnada, or bait, over the side of a boat right here in the harbor. For bait we use fish heads from the morning market. The big, oily forehead of the dorado (common dolphinfish) is the green turtles' favorite.

Arica prepares to go turtling.

A dorado head.

Waiting around for green turtles to show up.

Workers in the water and on the boat haul in a mature green turtle.

To catch hawksbills we have to put in a little more effort. We snorkel along the rocky coast and sandy beaches, and when someone spots a hawksbill, she keeps her eyes underwater while raising her hand in the air. The boat comes over to help out.

This male hawksbill must have weighed hundreds of pounds.

Vanessa and Cory measure a hawksbill while Arica records data on a plastic cutting board.

In both cases, the turtle capture itself is quite a sight. Our turtle-catching extraordinaire, Luis, leaps onto the turtle from the boat, mask and snorkel already on his face. He uses his left hand on the front of the shell, directing the turtle's movement upwards, and his right hand on the back of the shell, pushing the turtle up into the boat. Depending on the size of the turtle, this maneuver can be simple or extremely difficult.

Dean, an Equilibrio Azul worker, demonstrates the turtle-catching hold.

Once the turtle is on board, we move through our steps as efficiently as possible. We cover the turtle's eyes with a wet cloth to keep it calm, and take measurements of the carapace (top shell), plastron (bottom shell), head, and tail.

Amelia measures the plastron length.

We record the GPS coordinates of the capture.

The GPS lives in a waterproof sleeve.

We check for metal ID tags at the base of each back flipper. If we find tags, we record the numbers to keep a log of where the turtle has been. If there are no tags, we sanitize the flipper with alcohol before attaching some. We also take a small DNA skin sample from the neck of new turtles.

If the turtle isn't yet tagged, we add a metal tag to each back flipper.

We photograph both tags and both sides of the turtle's face as a backup identification method.

You can identify an individual by its unique facial markings.

Finally, we take note of damage, illness, or epibiont organisms before scraping any adhering barnacles off the body and head.

This turtle has a barnacle hairdo.

I'm fascinated by the idea that the turtle's shell constitutes an entire ecosystem with substrate, nutrients, climate, bacteria, plants, and animals. Last semester I completed a research project on the epizoic algae of Galápagos green turtles. I compared carapace algae to the algae which grows on intertidal rocks: in both cases, algae alters the habitat and allows other organisms, including animals, to move in. I wanted to find out how carapace algae relates to cleaning fishes, barnacle load, microbiota, and turtle health. During that project, my partner and I also discovered a previously unrecorded green turtle epibiont species, the Galápagos pencil urchin. Suffice it to say I am interested in sea turtle epibiota!

So, I have been intrigued by the various epibionts we have pulled off green and hawksbill turtles during our captures. We found this little crab hiding under the back lip of a green turtle's carapace, and once we discovered a baby octopus lodged under the shell!

An epizoic crab.

It's a common assumption that barnacles are bad for turtles, and that's why we scrape the bothersome crustaceans off the turtles we capture, but I have never found a scientific paper linking turtle health with algae or barnacle load. I would love to see (or write?) a study on the specific effects of barnacle removal.

This morning before we snorkeled for hawksbills, Luis taught me the art of the turtle capture. Alas, we found no turtles today, so I have yet to try out my skills.

A western painted turtle I caught while camping in Washington State.

As a kid, I proudly earned the nickname of "turtle whisperer" for my ability to catch western painted turtles in the lake where my family went camping every 4th of July. Granted, painted turtles are about 1/700th the size of mature sea turtles (a painted turtle weighs around 1 pound, whereas a green turtle can reach 700 pounds), but I still hope to try my hand as a sea-turtle whisperer one of these days.

The Turtle Whisperer.

In response to my dad's comment... Here are a couple modern examples of turtle whispering.

The upside-down turtle we rescued along the Tiputini River.

I was studying abroad at Tiputini Biodiversity Station in the Ecuadorian Amazon. On our last day, the whole class was moving by motorized canoe to catch a flight, but of course we stopped the boat, backed up to shore, and saved this upside-down river turtle from death-by-dehydration. I love Ecuadorian Time.

My first wild Galapagos tortoise friend.

Here I am with a giant Galapagos tortoise. I had seen a several of these huge reptiles in the Galapaguera, or hatchery, but this was my first sighting of a wild one. (She was surrounded by broken glass, plastic, and a tire. And as you can see from our bus in the background, she was right by a parking lot.) But she was a giant tortoise! IN THE WILD! I was more than a little excited.

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Nest Exhumation

Nest exhumations are one my favorite things to do with Equilibrio Azul. On my second day, we headed down to Playita, a pristine white-sand beach with no access to the public.

I felt privileged to enter through this locked gate with a "no trespassing" sign.

This beach gets special protection because it's one of the only known hawksbill nesting site in South America. It's also a favorite site for green turtles, and it was a green turtle nest we would be exhuming today.

The Turtle Team preparing to excavate the nest site.

One of my first questions was, how do you know where to dig? The answer is this: every single night during nesting season, a small group of volunteers and park rangers camps out at Playita overnight. Every hour, someone goes on a "night patrol" of the beach to document any nesting turtles. The eggs are counted as they are laid, and nest is marked with a red stick. Two months later, we consider the nest "dead" and dig it up, since the average incubation time for both greens and hawksbills is 60 days.

Arica did the actual digging by hand.

The first eggs we discovered were tiny, round, hollow things. Our mentor, Caro, explained that green turtles often lay these infertile duds in the nest to crate airspace around the real eggs.

Barbara shows off an infertile egg.

Then we started unearthing egg shells of the successful turtlings and whole eggs of the unsuccessful ones. We ripped open the leathery/papery shell of each unhatched egg and recorded both the cause of death and the stage of development at which death had occurred.

Many of the eggs showed the bright green goo associated with fungus.

Others had the white, cheesy texture and rancid smell of bacteria.

The record sheet also had check-boxes for "plant roots," "insects holes," "crab holes," and "flooding." And those are just the threats inside the nest -- the turtles also face hungry birds, dogs, cats, and crabs as they make their journey to the ocean. It's estimated that only 1% of green turtle hatchlings will ever reach sexual maturity.

Some fetuses were at 4/4 development, meaning they were ready to hatch when they died.

It was amazing to feel the leathery flippers and tiny shell.

Dead 4/4 fetuses kept piling up.

Caro said it's normal to see a lot of unhatched eggs, but it was sad to bury the turtlings.

When we were done with the morbid affair, we returned all the refuse to the hole and buried it with sand. As we hiked the twenty-minute path from the beach back to the road, I was filled with unanswered questions. What kind of bacteria infect these eggs? What kind of fungus? I can't wait to take microbiology and statistics courses so I'll be more prepared to take on research projects like these in the future.

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Beach Patrol

One of Equilibrio Azul's tasks is to patrol four of the beaches within Machalilla National Park, here on the coast of Ecuador. Every few days a pair of volunteers walks the length of the beach looking for signs of turtle nests. I went on my first patrol to Playa Salango with Barbara.

We were equipped with flip flops, measuring tape, pencil, and my dandy Rite-in-the-Rain notepad.

We found one set of tracks in the sand - they looked kind of of like a tire track from one giant wheel. We crossed them out with an "X" to make sure we wouldn't measure the same nest twice.

Crossed out tire -- I mean turtle -- tracks.

That sandy patch is the nest.

When she's ready to nest, the Mama Turtle swims all the way back to the beach on which she herself hatched. She hawls herself up past the high-tide line and looks around for a suitable nest site. If she doesn't fine one, she heads back to the ocean, but if she finds a spot to her liking, she starts digging through the grass and sand with her clumsy flippers. It takes about an hour for her to dig the chamber, lay the eggs, and refill the hole with sand. Green turtles usually lay fewer than 100 eggs, but hawksbills can lay over 150.

Finding our way back home.

After the patrol, we walked down the coastal highway hoping a passing motorist would take pity and give us a lift home. Eventually one did, after making sure we weren't overly wet or sandy. The panoramic views of the Pacific Ocean and the tropical scrubland hills made for a spectacular ride!

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Stranded in Puerto López

Hey world,

I planned to leave Puerto López for the Galápagos Islands after a day or two. Well, the research permits didn’t work out right away, and my visa never came, and we are all on Ecuadorian Time after all. I integrated myself into Barbara’s turtle volunteering organization, Equilibrio Azul, and I’ve been here helping out with the turtles ever since.

I won’t bore you with the daily trials of life in Puerto López. Instead, I will focus each blog entry on a different aspect of the turtle conservation project. I’ve gotten the opportunity to do some pretty gnarly things, from ripping open dead eggs full of bacteria and fungus, to patrolling a restricted white-sand beach for nesting hawksbills at night, to snorkeling amidst jellyfish in search of tagged green turtles. I’ve also had my share of adventures of the bird-watching, horseback-riding, and scuba-diving variety.

Here is a tantalizing sneak peak at the entries to come:

Bomb scientists using tools to measure turtle tracks in the sand.

 Nest excavations and embryo autopsies.

Shark bycatch at the morning fish market.

Cute children painting the fence blue.

Mud ninjas.

Adolescent blue-footed boobies.

Big hawksbills in little boats.

And much more!

It’s not research in the Galápagos Islands as planned, but there are worse things than being stranded in Puerto López. I have enjoyed living these adventures – I hope you enjoy reading about them!

Yours truly,

Nina

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