Tuesdays with Turtles – SSTCN Website promo

You see the hatchlings as they dig out of the nests all small and helpless and make a beeline towards the sea. You see the adult female as she comes back to lay her eggs. You see adult males when you go snorkeling , but the juveniles had kept a low profile, until now…

Sea turtles’ mystery hideout revealed – LiveScience – MSNBC.com

Once sea-turtle hatchlings hit the surf, they vanish for up to five years. Where the half-dollar-size tots spend these ‘lost years’ while ballooning to the size of dinner plates has been a mystery, until now.

New research, published in the online edition of the journal Biology Letters, indicates the green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas) hide out in the open ocean, where they feast on jellyfish and other marine creatures.

Turns out that they’ve been “hiding out” in the open ocean eating meat to augment their vegetarian adult diet. I have not seen the paper (reference below), but the study was based on an analysis of their shell content. Carbon and Nitrogen isotope analysis was used as a marker for diet and location.

The ‘lost years’ of green turtles: using stable isotopes to study cryptic lifestages

Kimberly J. Reich, Karen A. Bjorndal, Alan B. Bolten

Archie Carr Center for Sea Turtle Research, Department of Zoology, PO Box 118525, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA

Great Turtle Race

Follow eleven turtles as they sprint from Costa Rica to near the Galapagos. Each of them has a corporate sponsor, and at 20 miles an hour, they will get there in a couple of weeks! I think Billie’s going to win, but the leatherback turtle is in bad shape, endangered due to poaching, adult mortality and habitat loss. They may be gone very soon.

Here’s the flickr page for the race, some beautiful pictures already.

This article brings up some interesting information about sea turtle poaching in Mexico, including the fact that sea turtle eggs are considered aphrodisiacal in certain cultures…

Real Men Don’t Eat Turtle Eggs : To Fight Turtle Poaching, Campaigners Hit Below the Belt (By C.J. Bahnsen)

But there have been recent gains. WiLDCOAST, a small conservation organization also co-founded by Nichols, has implemented a media campaign. It started in 2005, when Argentine singer and Playboy model Dorismar attracted controversial attention by appearing in television and poster PSAs, hitting Mexican men—who eat turtle eggs mistakenly believing they are aphrodisiacs—below the belt. The message above a salacious Dorismar reads: “My man doesn’t need to eat turtle eggs; because he knows they don’t make him more potent.” The bold campaign reached a global audience of 300 million and resulted in a decrease in consumption of sea turtle eggs.

Well, the unfortunate thing about aphrodisiacs is that if you believe, it works! So, I guess a Playboy model telling you that sea turtles eggs are baloney may work. They author does say there was a decrease in consumption, but presumably, it is not quite that easy to ascribe causation relationships to particular parts of a campaign!

Other highlights…

Turtle smuggling is thought to be a proving ground, a gateway into drug trafficking. Mexico is the principal transit country for 70 to 90 percent of cocaine entering the U.S., and the largest outside source of
marijuana and methamphetamine.

This, I did not know.

Grupo Tortuguero continues its David-vs.-Goliath efforts to co-opt fishermen and volunteers from Baja’s fishing communities to monitor, tag and protect sea turtles. The group has dozens of sites along the peninsula and all have drug issues, ranging from trafficking to addiction. “I’ve interacted with fishers who were not ‘poachers,’ but were poaching for money to feed their habit,” says Nichols

The article is interesting because it points out the similarities between sea turtle smuggling and drug smuggling, the use of young women, the co-opting of users to become dealers, the bribery of local officials, the organization to avoid capture, etc. Hmm…

Since this is the Olive Ridley blog (hint, it is a sea turtle), I do write occasionally about sea turtles. this is a random bit of sea turtle news out of Texas, and it is a feel good story…

Sea Turtles Rescued From Chilly Waters – New York Times

At least three dozen juvenile sea turtles have been rescued from an arctic blast that caused the water temperature in an arm of the Gulf of Mexico to fall 18 degrees in 48 hours. The turtles, which are cold-blooded, were left comatose by the rapid temperature drop this week in the shallow bay where they feed. Animal rescuers feared that the cold would kill the turtles or make them so sluggish that they would be vulnerable to sharks.

The nice thing about sea turtle conservation is that they are good looking beasts, harmless and very accessible. Anyone who summers on the coast of North Carolina, for instance, can see at least a cordoned off area marked as a sea turtle nests. And they’re encouraged to keep watch for hatching, keep any eye on the nest, watch out for nesting turtles, etc. U.S sea turtle conservation has a long, and fairly successful history.

Here’s more on the green turtle.

Photo’s courtesy of NOAA’s fisheries website.

Following up on the fishing issues from last week, here’s word that lights used to lure tuna towards longline fisheries attract juvenile sea turtles as well.

Article – Science & Technology – Lightsticks may hold deadly attraction for sea turtles

RALEIGH, N.C. Longline fishermen use lightsticks similar to the glowing tubes that delight trick-or-treaters to lure tuna and swordfish to baited hooks. New research by University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill scientists suggests that for endangered sea turtles the lights may hold a fatal attraction.

Lab experiments by Ken Lohmann, a University of North Carolina biology professor and John Wang, a graduate who is now a research associate at the University of Hawaii and National Marine Fisheries, found that young loggerhead turtles in a tank tended to swim toward lights.

It’s well known that hatchling turtles on a beach will crawl toward lights as they try to find the surf. But researchers did not know whether juvenile loggerheads in the water shared that attraction. Young loggerhead and leatherback sea turtles, which are protected because of declining numbers, are inadvertently hooked during longline fishing.

Well, not so surprising, is it? Bioluminescence is a common enough phenomenon that especially at night, animals will be attracted to light as it can signal food. It’s tricky, but when you try to catch fish, tyou will catch other animals as well. So, when you change something about the way you catch fish, you need to study how it affects other endangered species…

Off topic, but it is ironic that I read this in the ocregister, which is a newspaper from Orange County, California. It reported on work done by UNC Chapel Hill, which is in Orange County, North Carolina.

I mentioned recently that elevated temperatures from climate could skew sea turtle sex ratios towards females. The featured news article highlights research which speculates that storm surges caused by increased hurricane (they call them cyclones in Austraila and India) intensity from climate change might lead to the flooding of green turtle nests in Florida, hastening their extinction. Why only the greens? Because they nest later than the other turtles and tend to be around during the height of the Atlantic hurricane season.

We know from previous research that loggerhead turtles have been nesting earlier because of elevated temperatures. Will the greens catch up. More pertinently, will there be enough survival of the early nesters of this generation to keep a viable population going while the whole population adapts? As with all climate change suspense thrillers, only time will tell… Depressing, at any rate.

News in Science – Cyclones may blast turtles to extinction – 15/05/2007

More severe tropical cyclones expected as a result of climate change may lead to the extinction of the green sea turtle in some areas within 100 years, researchers say.

The cyclones are expected to threaten how well the turtles nest and hatch eggs, placing pressure on already endangered populations, some of which are also threatened by fish trawling.

Researchers including PhD candidate David Pike, from the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Sydney, report their findings online in the journal Oecologia.

The researchers studied more than 40,000 sea turtles nests on an uninhabited, 38 kilometre stretch of beach along the Atlantic coast of Florida from 1995 to the end of 2005.

Each night during this period researchers surveyed the beach for turtles emerging to lay eggs, or for tracks of turtles that had already deposited eggs.

The stretch of beach is home to the loggerhead, green, and leatherback sea turtles, which start nesting at the beginning in April and end in late September.

This nesting season largely coincides with region’s tropical storm season, which runs from June to November.

Leatherback turtles (Dermochelys coriacea) and, to a lesser degree, loggerhead turtles (Caretta caretta) get around this by nesting and hatching earlier.

Only nests laid late in the season are inundated with seawater during storm surges.

But green turtles (Chelonia mydas) nest last.

Their entire nesting season occurs during Florida’s tropical cyclone season, which means their nests and developing eggs are extremely vulnerable to being washed away and killed.

Researchers are concerned that increases in the severity of tropical cyclones in the future may cause green turtle nesting success to worsen.