Checking in from the beach during the morning survey

There were a few turtles last night, but none on our stretch of beach. (see audio post below) Ikeya was first observed nesting on Juno Beach during the 2002 season. We had not seen her since then and were lucky enough to be called by the fine folks at Gumbo Limbo nature center in Boca Raton who found her nesting last night in Spanish River Park - almost 60 kilometers from where she nested in 2002. Niki scooted over to check, measure and take a look at her. Niki reported that she was very big at around 165 centimeters making her one of our largest girls! This recapture combined with the turtle Jeanette Wyneken witnessed the other night add greatly to our dataset! I guess our we picked the right website address FLORIDAleatherbacks.com. These turtles are Florida leatherbacks and they are likely using a large portion of the coastline to nest!


On a much sadder note.... I witnessed a Loggerhead trying to nest last night up near the Jupiter Inlet. I noticed she had a large cut on her carapace and upon closer inspection discovered that she had been hit by a boat very recently. Maybe even in the last day or so! She was covered with the unmistakable blue bottom paint from a boat with a large bleeding crack just above her lungs. I think that her right lung may have been punctured making her prognosis not very good. I tried to restrain her on the beach, but there was no way I could have kept her. She had recently had a very bad run-in with humans, and did not want anything to do with me! I will consult our vets this morning and see if there is anything we can do for this turtle if she happens to try and nest again tonight.

Last night was quite interesting! It started out very quiet - I had made a few passes on the ATV to the Jupiter Inlet and back without seeing a single loggerhead turtle. I was starting to worry about the lack of ANY turtles when my phone rang. Jeanette Wyneken (Florida Atlantic University) was leading a class on the beach up north at Hutchinson Island and she was calling to ask if I had seen anything yet. She was also worried about the lack of Loggerheads. I told her not to worry, they would arrive soon. While speaking I turned around to witness a female loggerhead crawling out of the water with a GIANT male hanging on to her carapace! I think I said something to Jeanette like "there here, and even the males want to come ashore!" I hung up the phone and quietly moved away from the loggerhead making her way up the beach. Not too long afterword the phone rang again and it was Jeanette once again. Her class had just encountered a tagged leatherback and wanted to know if we knew who it was. A quick check on the datasheets confirmed it was "Linda Sue", a turtle we first encountered on May 8th and had not seen since! I guess she has been nesting up north. This is the third time one of our tagged turtles has been found on beaches to the north. We will post a bit more info. as they send it to us later today. Only a few minutes later I found a new turtle! She was a bit on the small side for our our turtles, but she was quite beautiful in the light of the setting moon. After a long discussion we decided to name her "Angelina". Why, I really cannot remember....

Beatrice is sending a lot of good quality data to us, and I will update maps on the website later tonight when we get the latest data. Time for bed....

Sorry for the delay in updating the log this morning....

The season is now starting to get busy for us! In addition to the leatherback work we are doing, we also conduct regular morning beach surveys. The loggerheads are starting to trickle in now. Last night there were about 40 nests here on Juno. 40 sounds like a great number, but we should be seeing about twice that number this time of the year. During the morning surveys we count crawls and record locations with a very precise GPS system. A few nests are selected randomly and they are marked for further analysis.
Georgia was the only turtle we observed last night. I bet there will be more tonight.... This evening we are expecting to get a few data points from Beatrice. As soon as they are processed we will put them up here on this site on the tracking page.

Carl describes Caroli's return to the sea

Carl Safina describes Caroli's return to the sea

Caroli breathing as she covers her nest

Phone Calls....

"Sorry no turtle"

It is always exciting when our cell phones ring when we are surveying the beach at night. I always want to hear: "Got one" or "I found a turtle and she is new" But for the last few nights the first words out of the phone are "No turtle"
Even though this should be the peak of the season, there just haven't been any turtles in the last couple of days. The green turtles should start nesting in the next few days though. We watched two of them mating (another one nearby was very interested in joining too) very close to shore this morning. We are expecting this to be a very good green turtle nesting season.

Maybe tonight the phone will ring and Kelly will say "Got one, and it is Aries!" That would be cool!

Message in a bottle

Or more precisely messages in bottles! (even though that doesn't sound quite right) This morning was one of those mornings when you find interesting things on the beach. The wind was really howling once again last night and a lot of trash was washed up. I found two bottles containing messages that kids threw into the ocean. Maybe they were thinking about the bottles possibly travelling on a long journey similar to those undertaken by leatherbacks. These bottles often have return addresses with pleas for information on the bottles trip and it's final whereabouts.
I seldom return these messages, but not because I am a bad person! It is simply because most of them state "this bottle was released on 5-10-2004 on Juno Beach in Loggerhead Park...." and I happen to find the bottle on the same date, only a few hours later on Juno Beach in Loggerhead Park! I guess that maybe I should take the opportunity and send them a bit of a lesson on wind direction, currents, and tides? Or maybe it is better to let them imagine the bottle travelling the high seas for months on end and washing up on a beach 10 years from now in.....

Oh yeah, one leatherback last night. Hydra was spotted on the south end of our beach. She did not nest this time and we expect her to try again tonight. Interesting to note that she did not nest the first time we saw her in 2002 but came back a few nights later and nested successfully.

We were expecting quite a few turtles back last night, but only one of the them showed up. Unfortunately we did not see her!! There are a bunch of Loggerheads nesting at this time of the season and we are extremely careful out there on our ATV's. We might have been a bit too careful and drove right past a nesting leatherback at around 3AM. Extremely frustrating...

Maybe there will be a bunch more tonight?

This really amused me at 4:30 this morning.


Now, it doesn't seem that funny....

In addition to all of the studies we are conducting here on Juno Beach (leatherback contaminant analysis, documenting fisheries interaction, genetic analysis, satellite telemetry, collecting morphometrics, etc) I think that we should look into the "Fournies" effect. Sandy Fournies (Marinelife Center Vet. Assistant) spends many hours out here with us waiting to see a leatherback. Typically within a few minutes of her quitting and heading home a giant leatherback will emerge from the surf. It happened once again last night! Sandy leaves at 1:15am - turtle arrives at 1:30am. Any grad students out there willing to investigate the "Fournies effect"??

The full moon was beautiful! I will try to find the time today to post a few images.

We were lucky to find one leatherback last night. Sedna was spotted just as she was starting to dig an egg chamber at 12:30am. Sedna at first glance, seems like a perfect leatherback with no cuts or scratches at all. But, we found what appears to be a fishhook embedded in her right front shoulder. Leatherbacks encounter commercial fishing gear often and she may have come in contact with a longline boat sometime in her past. We are going to try to get our veterinarian out to check her out the next time she is nesting.
The loggerheads are starting to nest in decent numbers now. I think there were about 15 crawls in our survey area this morning. I had a good time watching the speckled swimming crabs this morning. They appear to be releasing eggs at the waterline. There were LOTS of them!

Last night was tons of fun!
The night started out rather late with Georgia arriving at 1AM. Shana called and said this turtle is HUGE, and I replied "yep that's Georgia". She is our biggest nesting turtle and stretches our tape measures at around 168cm! After a well deserved break from wind and salt, we headed back out and I found Maya quietly covering her nest on the north end of Juno Beach. I checked her out, continued north and encountered another turtle quickly heading towards the water! This one was Meissa a turtle tagged during the 2002 nesting season. We were unable to fully tag and measure her that year, so it was quite lucky that the single tag we applied to her was still attached. Meissa looked GIANT and I was really suprised to find that she was only 152cm or so. I thought it was the biggest turtle I have ever seen and it was funny to discover that Niki and Kelly described this turtle as "grouchy and as big as a bus" when they encountered her in 2002. We have not have time yet to fully examine her - she always seems to be finishing up her nest when we arrive. I hope that we see her again to figure out why she looks soo big....
The night did not end there however - one more turtle! Another turtle Zhang was found on the south end of the beach. Zhang was also tagged during the 2002 season and it was good to see her again. Shana described her as "perfect" with not a scratch on her. It is good to see that not all leatherbacks are scratched up and scarred.

I Guess the turtles are here now!