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  • Tag Archives ARIES

  • Bootes

    Posted on by chris 1 Comment
    Last night Sara and I came across a turtle as she was just finishing up her nest in MacArthur Park. I checked her tags and then checked the list of turtles to see who she was. Wow, I checked the tags once again and had Sara check the sheets this time. The tag number belonged to Bootes! "Are you sure" I said as I checked her PIT tag. We double checked and verified that it was actually Bootes. We have been waiting for her to return for 4 years now! You are probably wondering what is so special about her?? In 2002 we deployed our first three satellite transmitters on our nesting turtles - Aries, Sandy and Bootes. If you have been keeping up with the project for a while, you will remember that Sandy was found dead on a beach in New Jersey on October 12th 2002 after being tracked from Juno beach to new jersey. A press release can be found here Aries and Bootes had not been seen since that season. We stopped receiving transmissions from Bootes after about two months and were worried about her fate (especially after what had happened to Sandy) Last night she looked great! Not a scratch on her and she even grew a bit since we saw her last. Here is an article with an image of Bootes (and me looking like an idiot!) Fathoms magazine We also spotted another nesting turtle on Singer Island. This one was a new turtle and she was rather tiny. At 134 centimeters curved carapace length she is bringing the average size of all our nesting turtles down. Not much else to report other than the rough surf and salty air. It makes the night really long and the ATV ride is a tough one. Hopefully it will die down a bit today.
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  • Phone Calls….

    Posted on by chris Comment
    "Sorry no turtle" It is always exciting when our cell phones ring when we are surveying the beach at night. I always want to hear: "Got one" or "I found a turtle and she is new" But for the last few nights the first words out of the phone are "No turtle" Even though this should be the peak of the season, there just haven't been any turtles in the last couple of days. The green turtles should start nesting in the next few days though. We watched two of them mating (another one nearby was very interested in joining too) very close to shore this morning. We are expecting this to be a very good green turtle nesting season. Maybe tonight the phone will ring and Kelly will say "Got one, and it is Aries!" That would be cool!
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  • Rainy night!

    Posted on by chris Comment
    Rainy night! Rain Kelly is on her own tonight. The weather looked so nasty on the radar that I decided to stay home (I live about an hour from Juno Beach) Kelly is out there now making a few passes before the weather turns too bad. I hope that she finds a turtle tonight, maybe Aries?
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  • Update 8-20-2003

    Posted on by chris Comment
    We have received a bit of data from our turtles! Aries, Sierra, Mariposa, and Pesca are transmitting well and have moved away from Florida. Mariposa is way out in the north Atlantic Ocean almost half-way between North America and Europe! I just plotted her location, and it appears that at some time during the week of 8-11-03 she swam right over (of very near) the location of the sunken Titanic.
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  • Aries

    Posted on by chris Comment
    I have the night off the beach tonight so I decided to play around with some of the data we have gathered from Aries. Aries is a turtle we first observed on 4-8-02 on Juno Beach and was our first turtle to recieve a satellite transmitter on 5-29-02. Her movements since then have been quite amazing! It is our hope that she will continue to transmit and send us important data which can help us to protect her species.
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  • no title entry linkThis entry has no title posted on February 25, 2003

    Posted on by chris Comment
    we're just back from an incredibly successful and fun! weekend. the Florida Turtle Permit holders meeting was held this year at SeaWorld Orlando. Friday night we attended a lovely reception where we received a giant check for a very generous amount to support our project - from the National Save the Sea Turtle Foundation. we'll have some pictures of that up on the website soon. on Saturday, we presented the results of our first 2 leatherback seasons at the meeting, and it was very well received. we'll try and have that for all of you to view as well. Saturday night was time for relaxation and getting together with our friends from the University of Central Florida - (who we did the satellite tagging with last summer). we had a great night out, celebrated birthdays and talked about the excitement of the upcoming season. on Sunday we had a lot of fun hanging around SeaWorld. a really very successful weekend. we're nearly all set for the season - chris has been surveying every couple of mornings, but so far no leatherback nests. it really will be any day now. keep an eye out for a new map of Aries movements - and our pictures from the weekend. they'll be posted soon.
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  • no title entry linkThis entry has no title posted on January 6, 2003

    Posted on by chris Comment
    well, it is already 2003! we are busy preparing our plans for the upcoming season and hope you are looking forward to following our progress. the season officially starts on March 1 - there is usually a leatherback nest laid somewhere in the state by that day - the countdown on our main page will keep track of how many days we have to go. as we began tagging turtles 2 years ago, we will expect to see at least a few of our tagged turtles from 2001 returning to nest this season. as well, we are very lucky to still be tracking Aries - she is far off the coast of Massachusetts at last transmission, and seems to be hanging around in that general area. check the tracking page to see her progress so far. with any luck - her battery powered transmitter will keep working all during this summer and into next fall. please stay tuned.....
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  • no title entry linkThis entry has no title posted on October 29, 2002

    Posted on by chris Comment
    we got the pictures of Sandy in New Jersey and they were pretty hard to look at. she had prop wounds on her plastron (lower surface) and had obvioulsy been floating in the water for a long time. it was a terrible end to come to, but we know what happened to her at least, and won't be expecting her to return to nest in 2 years. we will however, continue to monitor Aries' movements - she is still swimming off the east coast (off South Carolina at last reporting I think).
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  • no title entry linkThis entry has no title posted on July 1, 2002

    Posted on by chris Comment
    We will likely venture out a few more nights to do short surveys later this week, but I guess the season is just about over now. We have been out for the past few nights with no luck, no leatherbacks anywhere in our survey area. Have you been tracking the turtles with the satellite transmitters? Aries has been really moving up north. She is currently about 600 miles (as the crow flies) north of Juno Beach and does not appear to be slowing down! I am going to put an animated map of her movements on the site in the next day or so. It is really wild to think that we tagged Aries a month ago, and now after swimming over 900 miles (based on satellite track) she is near Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.
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  • 52 leatherback nests

    Posted on by chris Comment
    even though we had last night off, we could barely keep ourselves awake tonight. Jeremy and I are just in off the beach, but Chris and Niki are out there, finishing up the tags on another new leatherback - the only one tonight. she false crawled about 1/2 an hour before she came back to dig an egg chamber. we are looking forward to hearing how our satellite tagged turtles are doing, we did get fixes on them from UCF and Hubbs, but they were not close fixes. looks like Sandy and Aries have moved north for now, hopefully we will know more tomorrow. Chris and I were looking at nest counts for Juno Beach tonight, right now we have 52 leatherback nests and last year at this time we had 74 (which was a record year). this means that although this year's nest numbers will likely be lower than last, we have already more nests than we expected for the whole season, and we are only half way through. June will be busy - and I am sure more than a few of our 35 tagged leatherbacks will return......
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