My name is Holly and I joined the MCSS team
two weeks ago, I’ll be updating the blog for the next couple of months. Last week
bought the release of our smallest ever caught terrapin, a black mud terrapin named
‘Mini Me’ who weighed only 6! Terrapin trapping has been fairly quiet, only one
Black Mud terrapin was caught this week, a female who I named Snorkel. We took
her X-rays and marked her with purple varnish before releasing her back in to
Pond 2. On Tuesday we conducted the monthly water tests and found everything
was in order.
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| So small! |
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| Introducing Minime! |
We have also been conducting bird surveys
on the wetland and creating new maps of the wetland area using GPS. This is so
that we can refine our maps of the terrapin trapping sites and help us to do
some spatial analysis of the monitoring data. We’ve made a major development on
the Grand Police Wetland! We can now confirm the presence of a new endemic
species; an endangered Caecilian called ‘Frigate Island Caecilian’ that Inga
caught this morning with the help of a local expert. The discovery of this
mysterious amphibian reminds us how important the wetland reserve is! He was
very active and had to be sedated for his X-ray, after collecting some data he
was released back into the reserve.
We are currently setting into motion plans
for surveying the bat populations on our wetland reserve. We already know we
currently have a strong population of fruit bats and we are hoping to find the
endemic Seychelles Sheath Tailed bat; Coleura seychellensis. This species are incredibly endangered, listed as ‘Critically
Endangered’ on the IUCN redlist with fewer than 100 individuals thought to be
left on the island. These surveys will involve taking Bat Detectors out for
transect and point surveys. More news to come!
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