The patrols days for the nesting turtle beaches are quite busy
lately as we are now finding a lot of tracks, new nests and have more encounters.
We also noticed that the first nests of the season are actually
hatching and we had a few opportunities to dig the nests that already hatched in
order to collect data for our database and learn more about sea turtles
hatchlings behavior.
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Egg clutch survival data collection
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We dug a nest last Monday that was of a great
interest with a lot of information. The turtle nested on September 18th
and we can tell that the hatchlings came
out 65 days later. Unfortunately we found dead hatchlings, but also
intact eggs with several kinds of embryos, black, grey and white,
depending of the maturation stage, and of course rotten eggs as well
as eggs predated by crabs. Luckily about 135 young turtles managed to go out of
the nest and hopefully went into the ocean!!
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A Black embryo
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| A White embryo |
Another nice event was to encounter twice the same turtle, the same day,
on 2 different beaches: in the morning on one beach, that she left without
nesting and in the afternoon on an other one where she layed her eggs: Thanks
to the photo identification software! Nina and Michael, who are volunteers from
Germany, joined us last week, and were of great help during these days. They
took awesome pictures and videos of our everyday work as well as for
the turtle identification. Isabella and Keith, students from the
Seychelles Maritime School, helped us as well: Keith especially enjoyed staying
for 2 hours with a nesting turtle on a sunny beach!! Isabella was strongly interested
in collecting data from a hatched nest! Thanks to the team!!
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Hawksbill turtle exiting the beach
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