Picky Turtle's Return

On the 3 am walk, Chel and I found turtle tracks. We could tell, via the flipper tags, that she was the same turtle that false crawled (came onto the beach without nesting) last night. Tonight, or rather this morning, she actually nested. When we found her, she had already dug out the hole and laid most her eggs. Since she was already tagged and photographed last night, that cut down on our work and, thus, the total amount of time we spent dealing with her. She laid 133 eggs and we collected the rest of our data without incident. Well, mostly without incident. We had some trouble getting our field scale to cooperate. When it finally gave us a reading, we realized that, in pushing buttons randomly, trying to make it work properly (this is, of course, the highly scientific and approved method of dealing with faulty/annoying equipment when the usual recourse of smacking the stupid thing is ill advised), we had recalibrated the scale so that each egg was reading roughly 1/5 of its actual weight. 


The work tonight, though, raised some other questions that have come up each time we see and interact with a turtle. The Bay Islands Conservation Association (BICA) has the unenviable job of trying to enforce conservation practices in Honduras. Honduras has some laws in place to protect endangered species, such as sea turtles, but laws are only as good as the enforcement and there is nearly a complete lack of such follow through. That is why institutions like BICA are important. BICA has volunteers during the day and night during turtle nesting season. A volunteer, like Chel, may be on the beach six nights a week. They certainly earn my respect for doing this with no real return. The issue we have run into is when some of these volunteers make themselves self-proclaimed turtle experts. 


We've been working with two people, specifically, who have some erroneous ideas. There are also a few practices we've observed that indicate the data that BICA has reported may in incomplete/inaccurate. The first problem we ran into was that Chel had not been informed of what Lindsey would be doing with turtles. When they first encountered one together, Chel freaked out because Lindsey started moving to place a satellite tag on the turtle, dug up the nest to weigh and measure eggs, and was using white light. They also had a disagreement on when a turtle should be flipper tagged and, so, the turtle left the beach with a sat tag and no flipper ID tag. Turns out, BICA's policy is to only tag during the nesting trance (a state the female experiences during laying) while the most current scientific opinion is that that is the only time the turtle should not be tagged. White vs. red light is also slightly contested among the scientific community but the majority say that white doesn't bother the turtles too much as long as you wait until it has begun nesting so you don't startle it off the beach before then. Since then, the professor has informed BICA of our full data collection process but the information never got all the way down the chain of command to Chel. Another man who volunteers on the beach, has expressed concern about making sure we are far enough away and downwind of the turtle so that it doesn't smell us and get scared off. First, as a marine reptile, it's likely sea turtles don't have the best sense of smell. Second, if they can smell, it's likely a turtle wouldn't be too worried by the scent of a human. Anyway, it is an interesting situation and one that is not simplified by some language barriers. 


I have some pictures of both sea turtles and the Rescue Diver course but have not yet had time to edit and upload due to the crazy schedule we've had for the last few days. We've been going to the beach at night, of course, coming back and sleeping for a few hours, then getting up and promptly leaving for the dive center, getting back just in time to leave for the beach again. However, the course ends tomorrow so I promise pictures very, very soon!