Kelly Martin's blog

We're keeping busy out there! Tuesday night brought us just one turtle. Riley joined us shortly after 3:00am. Riley was first observed by Chris and Sara B. in May, 2006. She was seen one additional time that year and then again in 2008. Tonight, we had two turtles nest on Juno Beach. Cocoline, a turtle first seen by our crew ten days ago, nested just south of the Loggerhead Marinelife Center at around 11:30. We just returned to the office from yet another turtle. This time it was Eve, a turtle also seen in 2006 and 2008 by our crew. Interestingly, Eve has some distinct injuries that Chris and I recognized immediately. If you've read the previous blog posts, you've heard about my "curse" with morning turtles. Back on the morning of the 18th, after having what I thought was a fantastic "first turtle" night, I discovered that we had missed a morning turtle on the south end of Juno Beach. The next day we were approached by one of the regular beach visitors. She had seen this turtle nesting in the daylight and had taken several photos. She gave us a cd of the images and while we could not see any tags on the turtle, she had some pretty obvious injuries. We told everyone to keep an eye out for her. As soon as Chris and I saw Eve last night, we knew she had been our missed morning turtle. We were all pretty excited to know that Eve had not completely eluded us after all!

It's been a while since I've updated. This past week has been pretty busy! It's now been seven nights in a row that we've seen at least one turtle, in fact, we've seen 13 turtles in the last week. Five of these have been new turtles. We also welcome the return of June Bug, Rosie, Sophie, Kathleen, Roomba, Olive, Lucy and Icy. Lucy visited last night near the Loggerhead Marinelife Center. Lucy has been spotted many times throughout the 2001, 2003, 2006 and 2008 seasons. Already tonight we've seen a new turtle in Carlin Park and Icy returned in MacArthur Beach State Park. Icy is another one of our star turtles. We've seen her eight times throughout 2003, 2005, 2008 and 2010.

What a perfect night! The moon was full and the tide was low, making for perfect survey conditions out there. I started the south survey and found a turtle right away on the south end of Juno Beach. She was a new turtle and she was giant! I was joined by Andrew and the Hamels, a wonderful couple out enjoying a stroll in the full moon. They decided to name the turtle after their granddaughter, Carrington. She was one of the largest turtles we've ever seen at 166.5cm and she had not a mark on her - a big beautiful turtle! Rebeccah took over on the south end survey and called to report another turtle by the Singer Island Inlet. This was Rosie, a turtle that we saw four times in 2007. The batteries had died on Rebeccah's tag scanner so I headed down to bring her a replacement. Along the way, I found Sophie nesting on Juno Beach. Sophie was also a 2007 turtle. Sophie was seen only once that year and had never received a PIT tag. She had also lost one of her flipper tags so after I gave her what she needed, I headed down to meet Rebeccah and Rosie. Three turtles already! On Monday night I made a somewhat gutsy bet - I bet that we would get 4 turtles on Tuesday night. When my phone rang at about 4:00am, I asked Rebeccah if she had found my 4th turtle - she had! It was June Bug, nesting by Seminole Golf Course. June Bug was seen twice in 2003 by Chris and I. She received a satellite transmitter when she returned in 2007 which she wore for about a month. She is a very robust turtle and has signs of an old boat propellor injury. Curiously, three of our four turtles last nested in 2007. On average, we see our turtles return to nest every other year. Occasionally they will nest in consecutive years or skip two years before returning but it's interesting that all three of them skipped two years, especially since 2009 (when we would have expected them to come back) was such a huge year for us. All in all, a perfect four turtle night!

After four nights without seeing a turtle, the streak was finally broken on Saturday night. Tommy called to report a turtle just north of the pier at about 4:00am. Chris and I joined him and watched what appeared to be a very confused turtle. There was a small scarp in front of her that stood only about a foot high. This is nothing to a giant leatherback, we've often seen turtles climbs scarps that are three or four feet high. She attempted to get past it and gave up to start digging below it in the surf line. She attempted to go over it two additional times before eventually deciding to give up. We were able to put one flipper tag on her before she left. We were hoping to see this turtle again tonight but so far she has not made an appearance. Tommy named the turtle Alizebra after his neice Alexandra, who had a hard time pronouncing her name when she was young so she called herself Alizebra. Eagerly awaiting her return, Sonja headed out on the beach early tonight. Often, if they false crawl so late in the night, they will come back early the next night. Sonja was on the beach by 8:15 and called me by 8:30 to say that there was a turtle coming out of the water in the exact same spot that we had seen Alizebra the night before. Assuming it was her, I quickly made my way to the office to meet up with Sonja. When I got to the turtle, I checked her for tags and found that she had none. Another new turtle! She was a tiny turtle - only 145 cm long - and beautiful! A large family from Maryland was lucky enough to be on the beach and witness her nest. Some of their kids decided to name this turtle Cocoline. Still no sign of Alizebra but we're very happy to have seen two turtles in two nights!

Well, it's happened again. Another morning turtle...that we didn't get to see! For those of you who haven't read the recent blog posts, I seem to have a curse. In all the time that I've been working with them, I've never seen a "morning leatherback." They've happened several times each season but since I've worked here, I haven't managed to catch one even though everyone else has. We finished up last night thinking we had been skunked, no turtles! So everyone headed home. Tommy was only able to survey the north part of Jupiter until about midnight before the tide got too high to pass the narrow stretch around the Jupiter Beach Resort. Rebeccah and Andrew weren't able to make it past the Singer Island sea wall after that either. Everyone headed home around 7:00 am and Chris and I headed out to do the morning survey. We got to the north end of Jupiter, beyond where Tommy had been able to survey, and there it was - a nest :( We didn't really expect to see a nest there, the beach just south of the Jupiter Inlet doesn't see many leatherback nests. A beachgoer approached us to let us know that he had just watched her head back into the water. I'm now convinced that my first morning leatherback will be a truly spectacular one, and completely worth the wait! Here's hoping that we'll have a turtle-filled night tonight!

Unfortunately that's not good for us! Our survey area runs from inlet to inlet and is broken down into four beaches - from north to south they are Jupiter, Juno Beach, MacArthur Park and Singer Island. As I previously mentioned, there is a large sea wall at the north end of Singer Island that sticks out quite far into the water. We are only able to pass the sea wall at extremely low tides now which really limits when we can survey Singer Island. Tonight, high tide wasn't until 2:40 so Christy wasn't able to survey until after 3:00. When she got down there, a turtle had already come and gone. This has happened to us two times already this season. Singer Island his typically not been one of our hot spots for turtle sightings but maybe this year is the year. However, on a good note, we did see another turtle tonight! Christy spotted Tallulah covering her nest in MacArthur Park. Chris and I went down to see her at about 3:00. As we watched her cover her nest, she began to dig again. Christy hadn't seen her actually drop eggs but she was covering with her rear flippers as they only do after nesting. We thought it was a bit odd but we occasionally see turtles start to dig additional egg chambers after nesting. She "dug" for a while without really getting anywhere and then left. When we got back to the office and looked up her history, we noted that she was also observed doing this same behavior in 2006. We're not really sure what makes them so this. She was seen twice in 2006 and once in 2008. Chris and I are fading quickly tonight. We had a meeting at 3:30 this afternoon (which is like 3:30am for those on a normal schedule) so we were only able to sleep about 4 hours this morning. We get a bit crazy in the early hours of the morning when we haven't slept much!

Last night we encountered yet another turtle on Juno Beach. This time it was Katabatik, a turtle that we've seen just once before, in April of 2008. This turtle was named by Lisa, one of the LMC volunteers that watched her nest. She came up just north of the Marinelife Center. Katabatik received a PIT tag in 2008 but it wasn't scanning last night. This rarely happens, normally this is one of our long-term methods of identifying turtles. We are still able to identify turtles from the 2001 season by their PIT tags. Flipper tags don't always last as long. Katabatik still had her flipper tag so we were able to identify her that way. We gave her a new PIT tag and an additional flipper tag. Unfortunately, while we were all watching her nest, two other turtles came up to nest on the south end of our survey area. By the time Chris and Liz headed back down there, they had left. Chris has a theory - "when there's one, there's another one!" meaning if we find one nesting turtle, there's probably another one somewhere on the beach. They seem to like to nest at the same time of night. We're always bummed to miss turtles, but three turtles in one night in March is a good sign for the season to come! We're hoping to stay busy. We just got back from our first ride down the beach for tonight - a very wet ride! There are some pretty bad storms here tonight but we're going to tough it out. I'll let you know how it goes!

The "morning turtle" is a highly coveted prize among our research crew here at the Loggerhead Marinelife Center. A morning turtle is one that arrives on the beach in the early dawn hours and stays until sunrise. It is a beautiful sight to watch a leatherback turtle nest with the sunrise behind her and one that we rarely see. Throughout the history of the project, our crew has observed morning turtles only a handful of times since the turtles are generally gone well before this hour. There is now a long-running "joke" in our office because I have yet to see one! I have seen the "twilight" turtle but never a real morning turtle. All of our other research employees, and even some of our seasonal hires have seen a morning turtle, but they have eluded me so far. Not only have I never seen a morning turtle, but the turtles seem determined to keep it this way. I have a history of just missing them, or of being on vacation when it happens. Some nights it's easy to wrap up our surveys at 5:30 or 6:00am because we're cold, tired and just don't feel like there could possibly be any more turtles (because there rarely are at that hour!). It's always on these nights that they come. I head back out around 7:00 to do the morning survey and sure enough, there is a nest that was laid after my last run of the beach. This happened to me last year and I was kicking myself. Well, what I failed to tell you in Thursday's blog was that it happened again! On Wednesday night, after all of my excitement over our first two turtles of the year, I left the beach at around 5:30. I spent the morning training our new hires on how to fill out datasheets and re-stock our field boxes. Sure enough, Christy called around 9:00 from the morning survey to say that there had been another nest after we had finished for the night. They did it to me again! So that actually made for three nests on Wednesday night, not two. One of these days, I'm determined to see the perfect "sunrise turtle!" Maybe this morning?? We're wrapping up the night and haven't seen a turtle yet.

Another successful night on the beach! Last night, as I mentioned, we saw two turtles. Tonight we saw another one. It just so happens that last night was the first night for one of our new crew members, Liz. Tonight was Sonja's first night. Both of them were lucky enough to spot a turtle on their first night! However, the night started out not so lucky. Sonja and I made our way to the south end of our survey area. As we attempted to pass a large sea wall, an unexpected wave crashed into our atv and drenched us! We hurried to get around the sea wall and then realized just how bad the tide and swell were. Normally we're pretty careful to take note of the high tide but this was an unusually high tide and a very large swell. We turned around and realized that we were definitely trapped by the sea wall. Up ahead of us was another one - we were stuck! So there we sat, in between two sea walls that were just too risky to drive around, soaking wet! We were forced to wait for the tide to roll out again. And eventually it did - two and a half hours later :( We were a bit chilly and ready to head back to the office but the only direction we could head was south, away from the office, because the north sea wall was still too risky to pass. It's a good thing we headed south - we found a new turtle all the way down at the inlet on Singer Island! She had just finished digging her egg chamber when we found her. Sonja was ecstatic! Her first leatherback ever! This turtle had no tags so we gave her two new flipper tags and a pit tag. She has been through a rough ordeal, she has a large gash over her left eye and multiple scrapes on her carapace and left rear flipper. Most of these were superficial and should heal well on their own. Sonja named her Teresa, after her mom. We watched Teresa return to the ocean and then headed back to the office for some much needed dry shoes and warm food!

What an eventful night! Our turtles have finally returned! We encountered not one, but two turtles last night! About 2 minutes after venturing onto the beach, Rebeccah and Andrew called to say there was a turtle just north of the Loggerhead Marinelife Center so we all went out to see her. It was Starry, a turtle that was originally tagged back in May of 2003 by the research crew at the University of Central Florida. She was tagged in Indialantic, FL. They are the only other organization that does nighttime tagging of leatherbacks in Florida. Starry was also seen on Juno Beach in April of 2008. She returned to visit with us again tonight on Juno Beach. The entire crew ventured out to see the first turtle of the year. We have several new crew members this year (Tommy, Andrew, Liz and Sonja) and after 17 nights without seeing a single turtle, we were all ecstatic to see her! Tommy, Rebeccah, Chris and I have been working since March 1st in search of our girls and this was a much appreciated reward for those of us working tonight. We were all very happy to have seen one turtle for the evening and headed on after watching Starry return to the water. A short time later, Rebeccah called again to say she was watching yet another turtle emerge. This time, she was in Jupiter. Liz and I, who had been covering the south end of our survey area, headed back down the beach to meet our second turtle of the night. Rebeccah and Andrew were standing with Kathleen, a turtle that has only been seen once before, in May of 2006. Chris met us all there and we watched Kathleen for about an hour. Many people ask why we name our turtles. We give names to our turtles because it makes it easier for us to remember their history and important information. Trying to remember a turtle by a code or ID # becomes difficult but having a name allows us to recall them quickly. This is helpful when we need to recall how many times we've seen a certain turtle or other specific aspects about that turtle and we don't have access to our computer database immediately. Overall, it was a beautiful (but cold) night out there and a great "first turtle" night!