This year has been a busy one for us! We are now a team of three full-time employees. Christy and I joined Chris in the spring and he is more than happy to have the help! The three of us, along with our seasonal field crew, once again hit the beaches in search of leatherback turtles. Each year, we monitor nightly from mid-March until mid-June. Each leatherback that we encounter gets tagged and measured. Please check out the “Our Research” section of our website to learn more about the history of the project and what we are learning by monitoring this population. We are currently in the process of updating our website to include the individual histories of each turtle encountered by our team. This will allow you to see the name of each turtle and a little bit about her. Once leatherback season gets back into full-swing, we will start writing nightly blog posts so that you can follow along with us as we encounter turtles on the beach. Please be sure to stay tuned for some exciting projects that we have planned for this spring and fun new updates to the website!
The end of the year always brings one thing for the research team – office time! We are very busy writing reports, creating summaries and proposing new work for next season. I have recently begun to compile all of the leatherback data collected over the past nine years! We have come up with some fun numbers and statistics that we want to share with you. Ever wondered how many times we’ve seen some of our turtles? Or how many gallons of coffee we’ve consumed to stay awake all night? Well, that one might be too hard to count but we have everything from the number of encounters to the number of flipper tags applied and even the total miles of beach surveyed over the years. I will start with numbers from this year. We will try to offer one new “fun fact” each day to get you caught up on our research.
Round 1 -
This year – we encountered 133 individual turtles! That is a huge record for us! Since leatherback turtles can nest anywhere from 2-10 times a season…how many total encounters do you think that means? Keep in mind, our results section will tell you how many nests we have on Juno Beach. While Juno Beach is the busiest portion of our survey area, we also monitor Jupiter Beach, MacArthur Beach State Park and Singer Island. Tune in tomorrow…
