Last season brought us several exciting turtles. We observed our first Canadian-tagged turtle nesting on our beach! The turtle, named "Christie" by the Canadian research group that tagged her, was originally tagged during an in-water capture off Nova Scotia on September 19th, 2007. Satellite tracking data have shown that our turtles typically head to North Atlantic waters after leaving the nesting beach for the summer. Dr. Mike James and his team then take over to learn more about leatherback behavior after nesting season. To learn more about their research project, visit www.seaturtle.ca.

We also tagged two new turtles that were observed nesting on other beaches in southern Florida and Georgia. "Alli", who was our third observed turtle last season (and our first new turtle of the year), was observed by a morning survey group in Boca Raton. "Imani" was tagged on Juno Beach in April and observed nesting on St. Simon's Island, Georgia in June. Each turtle really has it's own distinct behavior. Unlike Alli and Imani, "Eleanor," who was first tagged on Juno Beach in March last season, was observed nesting seven times last year - ALWAYS on Juno Beach.

Keep checking back. The season is fast approaching!

The research team has been busy lately helping with the recent cold stunning event in the state of Florida. Over the past two weeks, state wildlife officials and rehab organizations have been collecting turtles affected by the cold weather that stretched across Florida. When severe cold snaps hit, turtles are affected by the decrease in body temperature, often becoming immobile and floating to the surface. Many turtles needed extended care at rehab facilities for conditions like pneumonia while others simply needed a day or two to warm up before they were ready for release. Juno Beach served as a primary release site for the first few days and our crew assisted in the release of several hundred turtles over a three-day period. Our modified ATV trailer worked nicely when hooked to the back of one of our research ATVs and we drove loads of turtles down the beach all day long. Our hospital staff members have been busy treating over 80 turtles that required extended care in our rehab facility. Everyone has been putting in extra time and this work would not be possible if it weren't for the help of dozens of dedicated volunteers. Check out a few photos of the events from the past few days:
On another note, we are gearing up for the fast approaching leatherback season!! We are all a little bit antsy to get back out there. We miss those big girls during the winter! We should start our nightly patrols in early March. Everyone is placing their bets on how many nests we are going to get this year and we're curious to see if we can top last year! Stay tuned! As we get into full-swing we will update regularly and let you know who we are seeing this year!

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.