Found that transmitter...

Wanted to give you an update on the transmitter that we heard from our office on Monday June 13th. We found it!

On 6-13-05 at around 11PM I turned our police scanner on here in my office. (being on the beach all night can be a bit boring and we like to know what is going on out there) The scanner has the argos frequency 401.650 MHz programmed in it, and we often use the scanner to verify that our transmitters are working before deployment. It has even been used to locate a turtle or two!

At around 11:30am Monday the scanner stopped on the frequency and I noticed that there was a transmitter sending a signal. I soon realized there was a transmitter in the area and that it was NOT one of ours. I had checked the two inactive ransmitters here in the office and quickly logged on to argos and saw our active PTT's were not in the area (we had two turtles being tracked near Cape Cod MA and Savannah GA) We had also deployed two Wildlife Computers PAT transmitters along with the folks from NMFS this season and I was fully convinced that I was listening to one of those that had popped off one of our leatherbacks prematurely and floated back to our beach. I rode around the beach for a while on the ATV with the scanner trying to locate the signal - It seemed to be coming from an area near my office which is only about 150 meters from the beach. When the sun came up I recruited Niki and her friend Gwen to wander the beach and adjacent dune looking for it. We probably spent two hours wandering around looking for something that I KNEW was in the area. It was really rather frustrating!

Tired, and defeated we had decided to give up and head to bed. I put a few "have you seen this.." signs up along the beach and was getting ready to go home. But at around 11am, the signal abruptly stopped. Confused, and trying to figure out what happened I had a wierd thought that maybe it was in the garbage and someone had just collected it. I ran down to the beach and watched a guy on a tractor driving north after emptying the trash!

Could I really be right?? Was the transmitter in the trash? Or was it attached to a bird and it had just flown off?? Sandy and I hopped in the car with the scanner and found the guy about a mile away loading his tractor on the truck. Scanner beeping once again, we decided to follow the guy in the car to his next stop a few miles away. We picked up Niki and headed south to Singer Island, where we found him in a county park about 10 miles to our south. When we pulled in to the park I had just said, "Oh well, no signal" when the scanner beeped once again! We were excited and bummed at the same time. It meant I needed to go into the back of the garbage truck which was not too pleasant. Actually it was really, really nasty!

After a few minutes of searching, we pulled out a clear plastic bag and I could see a PAT tag clearly! I yelled and pulled it out to find out it was what I was looking for, but it was not one of the units we deployed a few weeks ago. Excited, we called Wildlife Computers and relayed the info. After a few hours, I got a call from Dr. Richard Kraus at Texas A&M University in Galveston. The transmitter was his and had been deployed on a 125 pound Blue Marlin a few days earlier! The tranmsitter was attached to the fish and was designed to "popoff" after 180 days. This transmitter released prematurely for some reason and by getting the transmitter back Dr. Kraus may be able to determine what actually happened.


A PAT used on one of our nesting leatherback turtles (the same as the one found in the garbage)

It was a really neat set of circumstances that led to the finding of the tag! Very odd that it would wash up on the beach directly east of my office in range of our police scanner. If we had not recovered the transmitter, Dr. Kraus may have never known what happened to that Blue Marlin!

If you happen to come across a turtle with a tag, banded bird, or a scientific looking instrument on the beach, please take a look and do your best contact the researcher with the information on the tag.

Here are some links to read more about the Texas A&M projects.

http://www.tamug.edu/pelagic
http://www.tamug.edu/pelagic/tagging-data.htm

quiet night

It was a pretty quiet night out there with only one nesting leatherback. Navi was found just as she was digging her egg chamber near the Juno Beach fishing pier. There were also quite a few greens and loggerheads nesting between the giant scarps that had formed a few days ago.

Curiously, our scanner here in the office has been beeping with the familiar sounds of Argos satellite transmisons since late last night. The interesting thing about it, is that we do not have any turtles with transmitters in the area?! The signal could be coming from anything with an argos transmitter like a bird, manatee, green sea turtle or even an offshore buoy. We are going to investigate the signal a bit more and see if we can figure out where it is coming from. More later.

Upside down

One turtle last night. I was riding the south route on ATV while Chris scoped from the road. No turtles on our first pass. It was tricky navigating the seaweed patches and cliffs, not to mention the sneaky rain squalls that came up from behind. On his second pass Chris was lucky to spot Lyra as she was making her way back to the water. He saw her from the pier and raced down to where she was. Lyra nested first in 2001, then again in 2003. My friend Jess joined me for the rest of the night. There were lots of loggerheads and green turtles nesting on the south end. They found little dips in the scarp where they were able to climb up the beach to nest. We did not see any leatherbacks, but we did see one interesting thing. On our final pass through MacArthur park we saw a really large white rock. Once we looked a bit closer we saw that it was a green turtle that had somehow flipped over! We hurried down to see if we could help and noticed that she was on top of a few small rocks (about 5 cm up from the sand). We heaved and pushed and finally pulled her over. I guess she had gotten up over the small rocks and a wave must have come and tipped her right over. She seemed a bit disoriented and exhausted when we righted her and it took her a while to get back into the water. She eventually did, and Jess and I felt lucky that we had found her. Jess had never seen an adult green close up, so she certainly got her chance!

Hurry up

Hey guys, our little turtle is heading north! You still have a chance to pick a name for her.


Click here for more details.

Will the rain ever stop??

Last night Niki and I dodged the rain and lighting once again. It has been a really wet season so far. The turtles don't seem to mind it though! Last night we saw one leatherback, missed one during a rain storm, saw two green turtles nesting and about 75 loggerheads. It was a pretty busy night.

Not as busy as Melbourne beach though... Dean Bagley gave us a call at around midnight with a couple of flipper tag numbers she did not recognize. I quickly checked our database and informed her that she had found "Salty", a turtle we tagged back in April. We were all pretty excited about the turtle that has now nested the furthest from Juno Beach! Not more than an hour later Dean called back to tell us that Salty was back on the beach nesting again. Wierd! Turns out that it was not Salty, but another of our Juno Beach turtles!! I am wracking my brain right now to remember which one it was but I am drawing a blank! Dean has now found three of "our girls" this season. Pretty exciting year this turned out to be. Things just keep getting more interesting. We've got something exciting planned for tonight. Check back in the morning!

proved me wrong

Last night's turtle count reached four (that we know of)...so I guess I was a bit quick to say that things were slowing down. I started south and found Clover nesting on Singer Island. She is a special turtle, missing her entire left rear flipper. Although it is harder for her to dig an egg chamber, she manages and fills it right up with eggs (often times spilling some over since the hole is usually a bit lop-sided). It took me a bit longer than I had hoped to get back up north. Once I finally did,I found a leatherback nest north of Seminole Golf Course. Sadly, I did not catch her so we don't know which turtle it was. Chris, however, found Julianna nesting south of the pier (a 2002 nester's first return) and then Shirley up in Carlin park. Shirley is also a turtle with missing parts. She is missing half of her right front flipper, an injury we don't see very often, but when we do, the turtles tend to be really large! Shirley is the exception, though, measuring in at about 134 cm carapace length, so she's a bit under average in that respect. With only a few rain storms soaking us from time to time, the night was rather pleasant. Let's hope for FOUR more tonight!

one in, one out

Only one leatherback to report for last night. We were hoping for more seeing as this is supposed to be the peak of our season. At around two a.m. Brettany and I found Shayna nesting just south of the Juno Beach Pier. Some nice people were quietly watching her lay eggs when we arrived and they were SO excited to have happened upon her. We fixed one of her tags, watched her cover up her nest and were on our way as a rain shower approached. The rest of the night was drizzly and hazy. Kelly did not see any leatherbacks, but she did see a few green turtles! We had the first green turtle nest on Juno Beach last night. So it appears that as leatherbacks make their way out of the area, in come the greens!

WOW

It was a busy one last night. Not really sure where to begin. I had a bad ride up here from my house(about an hour south) another tire blowout! Second one in a few weeks. I started out on the beach pretty late and thought I was going to miss a turtle - I did. But we did manage to see six others! First was Polaris who did not nest but only wandered around the beach for a few minutes, then came a tagged turtle up on Jupiter Beach, then another at the Jupiter Inlet, Kelly had one down on Singer Island, another near the Inlet, and finally a turtle near the Juno Beach fishing pier. I was really rushing around to find all of them and realized that one of the turtles was Musca! Musca is a turtle that we had placed a harness and transmitter on back on April 6th. We had not heard from her since May 8th, and I guess we know know why... Her harness was completely gone! Not really sure what happened to her harness but our last position for her was southeast of Cape Canaveral.

The last turtle was a new girl and I spotted her dropping eggs at round 3am. I added a few tags, measured her and went down the beach looking for more. The next time I went by her nest, she was still there. She had dug another hole and was trying to drop a few more eggs. I guess she must have done this 4 times, as she was still on the beach at 7am! I took a few pictures of her and will post some later today. Not really sure what her problem was, but she seemed rather odd!