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