Georgia was the only leathebrack to nest last night. I encountered her down south in the Lost Tree Village area. Listen to the audio post for more information.
I remembered late last night that Carl Safina was out with us during the 2004 season and he was able to see Georgia nesting. Carl wrote about the experience here on Juno Beach in his latest book, Voyage of the Turtle : In Pursuit of the Earth's Last Dinosaur. Be sure to check it out!
I have been seeing quite a few mating pairs of green turtles at night now. The warm wind from the east sometimes pushes a few on to the rocks along the southern section of the beach late at night. So far, we have 3 nests along Juno Beach with quite a few more down south along MacArthur Park and Singer Island.
- Tag Archives GEORGIA
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fun night continued…
Well, I guess it is my turn to post. Last night started out wet and rainy on the beach but luckily I was not on the beach! Niki and I headed down to Fort Lauderdale to take part in the launch of Kirstin and Garys new sailboat "the wandering albatross". They have building a sailboat for some time and she is big, beautiful and almost ready to sail away!
By the time I got out on the beach, the rain had just stopped and the turtles ALL arrived on the beach to nest at the same time. I have really never seen anything like it! I sat watching maybe 6 or 7 loggerheads crawling up the beach for a while before I figured out there might be a leatherback doing the same thing. Up the beach I found Georgia just covering her nest. That turtle is GIANT!! Our largest turtle is an unmistakable sight - she looks like a small car crawling down the beach. She really does look like a car! I know because not too long after I saw her, I saw an actual car driving along the beach. Yes, someone had driven the car (of course it is against the law!) from the Jupiter Inlet down the beach in the wet sand almost a mile and then turned around and left. They even got out and looked at a nesting loggerhead! People are wierd!
I also found another nesting leatherback. Sedna is an interesting turtle. Kelly and I noticed a large "bump" in her shoulder when we first observed her last month. The mass really felt like a large embedded fishing hook - the kind typically used in long-line fisheries. Unfortunately we had really no way of finding out what the mass contained without cutting it open or X-Rays (which might be hard on the beach...)We wondered if there was another way to find out what was in there and realized we could use a metal detector to see if the mass contained metal. Sure enough, Sedna came back and we determined the mass does in fact contain metal! More evidence that many of the turtles we observe, have interacted with commercial fisheries.
Look at the mass in Sedna's shoulder - we typically see scars in this area. The black wand device is our metal detector which we use to scan nesting leatherbacks for metal.
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This entry has no title posted on May 24, 2004the moon is starting to come around again, so we had a bit of light when we started out last night, but then once the moon set, it was super dark and hard to see, especially with the tide coming in after midnight. the water was nearly flat, as we've had calmer winds the last couple days. that didn't last all night though, around 2 am the wind picked up and brought with it a chill. by this morning at 5:30 am it was pretty cold on the beach and I was glad for my jacket. nesting was very quiet overall, there was virtually nothing coming up after 2 am...except our one leatherback of the night! Strangely enough, I found this turtle nesting only 20 m from Georgia's nest from the night before. I had to look twice at the crawl as I passed because she had come up exactly where Georgia had come up. this turtle was Yerba, and we have not seen her since March 30th, when Chris first tagged her. who knows where she has been in the meantime...the interesting thing about Yerba is that some friends of ours may have seen her earlier in the day. Dean (Pura Vida Divers) was taking some divers out during the day and spotted a leatherback in about 70 feet of water. gradually the turtle got closer to shore and the last they saw of her, she was in 20 ft of water near the south end of MacArthur Park. that's where the nest was! leatherbacks usually arrive at their nesting site the day they are going to nest. researchers have documented them swimming towards shore and then back out again into deeper water several times during that day before nesting that evening. maybe they are checking on a good site to make their approach to the nesting beach. leatherbacks prefer a steep slope off the beach into the water, and with as few rocks as possible (they get cut easily). so maybe Yerba had been taking a few runs at the beach before she found the right spot...that's all we had for the night...
- This entry has no title posted on May 23, 2004Sorry for the delay in updating the log this morning....
The season is now starting to get busy for us! In addition to the leatherback work we are doing, we also conduct regular morning beach surveys. The loggerheads are starting to trickle in now. Last night there were about 40 nests here on Juno. 40 sounds like a great number, but we should be seeing about twice that number this time of the year. During the morning surveys we count crawls and record locations with a very precise GPS system. A few nests are selected randomly and they are marked for further analysis.
Georgia was the only turtle we observed last night. I bet there will be more tonight.... This evening we are expecting to get a few data points from Beatrice. As soon as they are processed we will put them up here on this site on the tracking page.
- This entry has no title posted on May 23, 2004I'm home now - I sort of delayed my night off and went out onto the beach tonight with Carl and his friend Leah, it was going to be just for a few hours as Chris and Shana were already working and covering the beach. As we headed down the park trail, we saw the little screech owl family that lives in a big tree along the trail - they were sitting on the fence ready to go hunting. they are the cutest little birds and I look for them every night. We thought we'd be out until maybe midnight, and hoped for a lucky early turtle. Carl, Leah and I were in MacArthur Park around midnight and had arranged to meet Shana a bit further up the beach - then we were going to call it a night. We started going north, when all of a sudden I saw the crawl - a leatherback had come up right in the middle of the park while we were sitting at the south end! and what a turtle to get to see - it was Georgia - our largest turtle ever found on Juno Beach. she is really massive, with her carapace at 168 cm in length and 121 cm wide. She was digging her egg chamber when we found her and then we watched quietly in awe as she lay her eggs, covered her nest (very extensively) and then moved down the beach and into the water. we all felt elated at having such a lucky find. Earlier Chris had called to say he'd seen a turtle false crawl up at the Jupiter Reef Club so hopefully she will return tonight and nest. It's been a good night so far.. there will be an update from the crew in the morning... now for some extra hours of snooze for me!
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the turtles are here
Last night was tons of fun! The night started out rather late with Georgia arriving at 1AM. Shana called and said this turtle is HUGE, and I replied "yep that's Georgia". She is our biggest nesting turtle and stretches our tape measures at around 168cm! After a well deserved break from wind and salt, we headed back out and I found Maya quietly covering her nest on the north end of Juno Beach. I checked her out, continued north and encountered another turtle quickly heading towards the water! This one was Meissa a turtle tagged during the 2002 nesting season. We were unable to fully tag and measure her that year, so it was quite lucky that the single tag we applied to her was still attached. Meissa looked GIANT and I was really suprised to find that she was only 152cm or so. I thought it was the biggest turtle I have ever seen and it was funny to discover that Niki and Kelly described this turtle as "grouchy and as big as a bus" when they encountered her in 2002. We have not have time yet to fully examine her - she always seems to be finishing up her nest when we arrive. I hope that we see her again to figure out why she looks soo big.... The night did not end there however - one more turtle! Another turtle Zhang was found on the south end of the beach. Zhang was also tagged during the 2002 season and it was good to see her again. Shana described her as "perfect" with not a scratch on her. It is good to see that not all leatherbacks are scratched up and scarred. I Guess the turtles are here now!
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tricky!
For having such a tiny brain, those turtles sure can be tricky at times. last night - perfect night - warm, leatherbacky (see March 17), and high tide at 10:15 pm. you'd nearly expect a turtle around that time. especially since we had an early one the night before. but no - that's not the way they like to do it - Georgia showed up tonight nearly at low tide on a very remote stretch of our beach. being our largest turtle - she's a bit like a Hummer, nearly as wide as she is long at 168 cm in length and a whopping 123 cm wide (most leatherbacks around 110 cm wide), it would make sense for her to haul her giant body onto the beach at high tide to avoid a long walk. but perhaps she is so large that she just does what she wants. in any case, she nested at 3 am. she was here 24 days ago, so she's likely nested somewhere else in between March 28th and tonight. she had some fresh scrapes on her right front flipper (not sure what those are) - she's missing half of that flipper anyway. the nights are getting to be just perfect, with a light breeze and warm temperatures - although usually accompanying those things comes the bugs.. we've a special edition blog planned to explain all about the bugs that we come across. there are a few species that have some strange habits.. more on that later..
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What a fun night!
What a fun night! We started the evening off with a dinner gathering at our good friend Andy's house. Kelly along with her parents, Niki Desjardin, Jeanette Wyneken, Mike Salmon, Denise and Marie joined for a nice Italian dinner to kick off the summer. After dinner, I headed out on the beach alone to survey for turtles. At around 12:30am I spotted a new turtle in Carlin Park. I tagged, measured and took a genetic biopsy sample from her and headed north a few hundred meters and found another turtle. It was "Georgia"! Georgia was first observed nesting during the 2002 season nesting on Jupiter beach - no more than 2 kilometers from where she was found tonight! "Georgia" is our biggest turtle (giant) at 168.0cm.
I met up with Kelly, Niki and Kelly's parents at the first turtle and we named her Rhoda after Kelly's mom.
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Six leatherbacks!
Haley, Atria, Big Bertha, Reeves, Sierra, and Tina "the teeny turtle" It was a busy and fun night out there! Six turtles in a single night (3 new) is a record for the project, and we really had to work hard tonight . Shana started the night off with an early turtle at around 9:30, but she didn't feel like there would be any others due to the extremely low tide at around 3:30am. It would seem that she was wrong! We were on the phone and running around all night dealing with both new and returning turtles. The names we came up with tonight are really original aren't they?? Big Bertha ties the record with Georgia as our largest turtle at 170 centimeters! Tina "the teeny turtle" was not that small, but after measuring Bertha anything would look small. What a great night! We are all so tired from the work and it is time for bed.
- This entry has no title posted on June 19, 2002Looks like Aries has finished nesting and is heading north! She is now in Georgia waters approx. 325 miles north of Juno Beach. Aries has traveled almost 750 miles since we placed a transmitter on her and it is hopefully only the beginning. I just received more data from the UCF crew and will process it in the morning, and create new maps.