Each year we put a lot of wear and tear on our ATVs. Every night during leatherback season, we drive up and down a 12 mile stretch of beach in search of nesting turtles. On average, we make 3 round trips each night. Our survey methods have changed a bit and we've accumulated more beach in our survey area but our best guess is that we've driven well over 40,000 miles in the past nine years on our ATVs! That's a whole lot of miles in the cold, rain, wind, heat and bugs in search of nesting leatherback turtles!

On April 22nd of this year, we smashed yet another record. We encountered 13 turtles in a single night! Almost all of these turtles were seen before midnight - it seemed they all came ashore at the same time. There were 17 nests on our survey area but unfortunately we missed four of the turtles. Tagging 13 other turtles keeps us busy and we can't get down the beach fast enough to catch them all! 4 of the turtles seen that night were new turtles that had never been seen before by our staff. 4 other turtles had been seen by our researchers in prior years but were being seen for the first time of the 2009 season that night. The other 5 turtles that we encountered had already been seen previously in the season.

This trend continued through to the next night when we encountered 9 more turtles! Of these, 4 were new turtles. These two incredible nights brought us Ariana, Caitlyn, Cleopatra, Fanny, Juno, Mola, Rikki, Sara, Taylor, Eleanor, Leigh, Pearl, Navi, Remora and our 8 new turtles - Lola, Riviera, Nebraska, Nevada, Florida, Virginia, Kali and Cyndi! Many times, there are interesting stories behind the names of our turtles. Once we get our website a bit more developed, we will have more information about all of our turtles for you. You can also use the search bar to look for more information about some of these turtles in our past blogs.

This year, we encountered leatherbacks a record 332 times! 133 individuals, 332 encounters...we were very busy! About one third of our turtles were seen only one time but the majority were seen several times throughout the season. This year marked another record for us - the number of turtles encountered in a single night...to be continued!

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…

Finally! Bear with us as we wrap up the nesting season. Please check back over the next few days for a few fun updates from our 2009 leatherback season! It was an amazing one, with 277 nests on Juno Beach alone! Stay tuned for more!

The leatherbacks are still nesting here along Juno Beach! The numbers have dropped dramatically, but we have been getting one or two nests a night since we quit our nightly surveys. This has been an amazing leatherback season with more than 270 nests recorded on Juno alone. Based on our numbers, we believe that there may be more than 500-600 nests laid on Palm Beach County beaches!

Stay tuned for a complete update on the season.

Click here for an Animated Graph showing the number of nests along Juno Beach since 1989.

Last night, a turtle named "Frenchy" laid the 159th nest along Juno Beach, making this a new record season! We still have another good month of nesting ahead of us and research staff (some of us..) are predicting that we will see more than 220 nests along the Juno portion of our survey area.

Click here for an Animated Graph showing the number of nests along Juno Beach since 1989.

I guess it is hard to keep coming up with names for new turtles!
Here at the office, we have a list of names to pick from that staff, friends and volunteers have come up with for our new untagged turtles. Some of them have meaning ("Darcy" - meaning dark one) and some of them are named for friends and family that we have lost. I will never forget the meaning of the turtle names Eleanor, BG, Homcy and Linda Sue. Some of the names we pick are just named because we are a bit lazy and often look online for a simple list of names. This year, we have been using a list of names we all learned when we were young - state names of the United States! They do seem rather fitting though, Montana is a native American Indian word meaning "mountain" (she was a big turtle..) and the turtle Nebraska nested on a calm flat night which comes from a word meaning flat water.

We are in the middle of a very busy season here along Juno Beach.
Since we began surveying back in early March, we have documented 87 individual turtles and 47 NEW leatherbacks nesting along our beach! These numbers are really very encouraging for the population of leatherbacks in the Atlantic Ocean. It is only the end of April and we have already had more turtles than most of the season we have been working. I can only imagine what is in store for us in May, when the #'s typically increase. We could possibly see twenty turtles a night!

We have had two very exciting turtles return to nest this season. One of our favorites is Sara. If you have been following the blog for a while, you may recall the dramatic story of this turtle. Back in 2005, we found her trying to nest along Jupiter Beach. We watched her struggle to lay eggs for a bit before we found that she was completely "plugged up" with plastic. She had a large mass blocking her cloaca and she was unable to pass eggs (and everything else...) We were able to remove the plastic and she returned to try and nest about a month later. At that time, she seemed to have an infection from the blockage and she only laid a few unshelled eggs. Well, I am happy to report that Sara is fine! She nested perfectly on 4/23 and we will likely see her again over the rest of the season.

It has become a tradition to make the same silly joke each year around mid to late April when the "little" turtles arrive on the beach. So, here it is... Last night at around two AM, I heard the sound of chain saws on the beach and I knew it could mean only one thing. The loggers have arrived!
I spotted the first loggerhead of the season as she was heading back to the water after she had hit the dune and turned around. We usually find our first loggerhead around this time of year, but this one surprised me. I was expecting a big, shiny black Leatherback up near the dune when I first saw the crawl in my night vision scope. It took me a few seconds to realize what I was looking at and I almost did not notice the small yellow turtle crawling down the beach. They are really quite "tiny" when compared to the Leatherback in the scope. She did not nest anywhere on our survey area and will likely be back tonight.