Sunday, 7 September 2014

Wave after wave slowly drifting!

Last week the turtle team got called out to The Reef Resort in East End to find that the manager had a 8cm Hawksbill hatching that had been washed onto the beach. From initial observations the little fellow had a small surface abrasion on the right hand side of its shell, but other than this, the hatchling was all fit and healthy. After examining the hatchling we decided that the abrasion posed no real threat to its health so advised the manager that it could be released that night.

Photos: Sara Gregson

It is hard to estimate the hatchling’s age, but we estimate it to be around 5-6 weeks old. It is uncertain where it had originated but there are a few scenarios. One possibility is that it may have hatched from another country within the Caribbean basin, or he may have hatched in Little Cayman. We have had 6 confirmed Hawksbill nests there and one coincides with the estimated age of this hatchling.

Hatchlings that survive the journey from the nest to the sea enter the water with enough yolk sac to provide them energy for 24 – 48 hours. This time is crucial for hatchlings to swim as far out to sea as fast as they can until they can shelter in patches of Sargassum or any large floating debris that they can hid within. They enter what is known as the ‘floating nursery’ where they will spend at least a year rafting in the seaweed eating bite sized prey including  molluscs, crustaceans, hydrozoans, jellyfish, fish eggs, and Sargassum. Not only is it a source of food, the Sargassum will also provide the hatchlings with cover from predators. 

After 1-2 years the juveniles will be approximately the size of dinner plates and their pelagic lifestyle will be over as they make their way to coastal areas where they will use the high productivity of shallow coastal habitats to find prey.

At approximately 20-25 years, the turtles will reach sexual maturity and make the long journey back to their original natal beach, where the life cycles starts all over again (there’s the lion king again in the background!).

The little hatchling rescued in East End would have been drifting with the currents in the open ocean when it was pushed off course and onto shore. This is a relatively common occurrence, particularly in the winter and spring. Please call us at on the Turtle Hotline 938-NEST (938-6378) if you find a baby turtle on shore. 

Until we next blog again!
Luc :)


Wednesday, 3 September 2014

Hello... is it me you are looking for?

Hello there trust turtle Bloggers!

Apologies on the lack of posts over the last month! Time fly's when you work with turtles! We hope to find you all well!

Our season continues to keep us busy still on all the islands here in the Cayman Islands. On Grand both our day time monitoring of beaches and night time tagging of the females continue to keep our self and our hard working volunteers on our toes. While Little Cayman and the Cayman Brac continue to have very promising numbers of nesting turtles. Although our season of 2014 is not as busy as our record breaking year last year, we still have over 200 nests across the islands to keep us preoccupied.

Below are a few pictures of our season so far from hatchlings and tagging females to intern action shots, and even the rare opportunity to have all three nesting species of hatchlings (hawksbill, loggerhead and green turtles) in one hand at one time!

Enjoy and I hope to blog again soon!
Luc :)

Thursday, 17 July 2014

Little Cayman: Not so Little in the Eyes of the Turtles!

Little Cayman is 10 miles long by 1 mile wide and is one of the closest things to paradise that the Caribbean has to offer, dotted with mangroves, ponds and beautiful stretches of beach; ideal in the eyes of a turtle!


Known in the history books as one of the Turtle Islands (“Las Tortugas”), turtles have been returning to nest along Little Cayman’s beaches for millions of years. As with her sister Islands, over the past few hundred years Little Cayman has seen a reduction in her nesting turtles but things are starting to look up!

Little Cayman’s beaches are ideal for turtle nesting, with long stretches of untouched beaches protected by thick vegetation on the landward side. This means that turtles are able to nest all around the island and nesting sites here are idyllic compared to many beaches worldwide, where encroachment of nesting habitats by developments and lighting from beachfront properties threatens turtle nesting populations.

Nesting on Little Cayman started at the beginning of May and we have a total of 38 nests so far! We are now entering the next stage: our first two nests have already hatched and have been very successful.

On July 9th our enthusiastic volunteers that walk the beaches for us were invited to our first nest excavation of season 2014. After turtle nests hatch and baby turtles make their way to the sea, DoE staff and volunteers check to evaluate the hatch success and fertility of nests. For the loggerhead nest excavated on July 9th, out of 136 eggs, 106 hatched – an excellent success rate. Two hatchlings remained stuck in the nest and were successfully released that evening after sunset. These little hatchlings have a long journey ahead of them. For the major part of their early life little is actually known about what happens to these little guys and until they settle down on a foraging site after several years they are said to be in the ‘lost years’. Interestingly the majority of the turtles found in Cayman waters all year round would not have originated from the Cayman Islands. When hatchlings leave their nests on the beach and make it to the seas they weigh no more than 0.5oz and thus have little influence on where the waves and currents of the oceans take them. They are not strong enough to fight against currents and will drift wherever the current goes, being distributed throughout the Caribbean basin. If they make it adulthood then they will come home to nest, specifically returning to the same area of beach where they themselves hatched -- completing the circle of life! (Don’t lie, you now have the lion king stuck in your head!).

So in the eyes of the turtles, Little Cayman is and continues to be an ideal nesting habitat. And the continued success of the data collection and turtle conservation on the island would not be possible without our dedicated volunteers who give up their free time to walk the island’s beaches for us and report in any nesting activity. So I would like to say a massive keep going guys! You rock!

Thank you!

Lucy J
 



Thursday, 26 June 2014

What is the Marine Turtle program all about?

"Two very small and low islands, full of tortoises, as was all the sea all about, insomuch that they looked like little rocks, for which reason these islands were called Las Tortugas."

A description taken from Christopher Columbus on his first discovering of the Cayman Islands back in 1503. The little rocks referring to the numbers of sea turtles between the two Sister Islands. Today the nesting population has declined over time, and so in 1998 the Marine turtle program was set up by the Department of the Environment (DoE). In the first year of monitoring the program recorded only 30 nests on Grand Cayman, but over the course of the program being set up the number has steadily increase, and last season we hit our record number of nests island wide, with 287 nests on Grand Cayman alone!
Total number of nests on Grand Cayman

The Cayman Islands historically had four out of the worlds' seven species of turtle nesting along their coastlines: the loggerhead turtle (Caretta caretta), the green turtle (Chelonia Mydas), the hawksbill (Eretmochelys imbricarte) and the leatherback turtle (Dermochelys coriacea). Today there are only three species nesting: the loggerhead, the green and the hawksbill turtle. Each female can lay up to 5-6 clutches in a season each with 100-150 eggs in each clutch, with an incubation period of 50-60 days. Now that’s a lot of eggs I hear you say and why then is our general turtle population low? Well this is partly because only 1 in 1000 hatchlings survive to adulthood, which takes 20-30 years to reach sexual maturity. That’s a long time to try and survive along with plenty of other anthropogenic reasons which will we leave for another blog ;) stay tuned!

So what are we doing?
The nesting season starts from the beginning of May through till September, so we are well underway with our season now! With hatching set to start mid July onward. So currently we are doing our day time monitoring program. As the season progresses we will be looking for both female activity as well as nests starting to hatch until the females finish laying and we continue to the end with nest excavations. 

What are we looking for?

The island gets split up into two and is walked twice a week. We are looking for any turtle activity, be it a simple track up and down the beach (U-turn) or an attempted nest or a true nest. We will find it and record it. The tracks are unmistakable when seen:


On the left is a green turtle track seen by the symmetric flipper marks up the beach, and to the right is a loggerhead track identified by the asymmetric movement of the flippers. Very easy to spot when walking the beach. So if any of you bloggers that live in the Islands see these tracks, we want to know about it! Please call us anytime on the turtle hotline: 938 6978 or send us an email to doe@gov.ky.

Left:a green turtle nest, Right:Loggerhead u-turn
We are also doing turtle monitoring on our sister islands. We have a a great group of volunteers on both islands who walk the beaches for us and report back to us.  I would personally like to say a massive thank you to Jennifer Mills who has helped me get the ball rolling over in Little Cayman and who has got a group of workers from the Southern Cross resort to walk a large section of beach for us! You guys rock! Equally so do all our volunteers!

So that’s enough of me waffling on for one day!
Catch you soon!


Luc J

Thursday, 19 June 2014

Welcome Fellow Turtle Enthusiasts!!!

A massive hello to all!

Welcome to the Cayman Islands Marine Turtle program Blog. Here we hope to keep you updated and informed on all the goings on within the Islands turtle monitoring efforts. Interesting turtle facts, volunteer’s diaries and pictures will all be updated for all to see. If you have any questions or pictures that you have taken yourself, please share them with us and we will show them on our blog!

But for now I would like to welcome all followers to join our page and spread some turtle loving from the Caymans!

All the best and happy turtle following!!

Lucy :)