Milli's final blog

Milli's final blog 

Hello again! 

Another week has passed and sadly, my work experience is officially over.  

Just as predicted, there was a lot going on in the second week too;  

On Monday I visited Cerf Island to take a look at Savi's project. After the beach cleaning he taught the volunteers and me about corals, reefs, rays, seaweed and loads of other interesting facts. Afterwards, we observed sea urchins, sea stars, fish and the coral nursery on the snorkel trail and went for a little hike to the cemetery and the viewpoint, from which we had a beautiful view of St. Anne's, Ile Moyenne, Long and Round. 

Back on Mahé, terrapin traps were set up at different sites in the Anse Forbans wetland, which we checked every day, but there were no terrapins caught until Friday. Three black mud individuals had been captured by our traps, who will be measured for identification today (Monday 10th).

 

(The black mud terrapins that crawled into our traps on Friday) 

 

(One of the caught terrapins) 

On Wednesday I joined Vanessa for the Turtle patrol, but it's currently not the season for Hawksbill turtles so there were no tracks to be seen. It was educational nevertheless, because she told me about the turtle's nesting behavior, how to tell Green Turtles and Hawksbills apart by their tracks and experienced cases of poaching. 

The rest of the week consisted mainly of checking the traps, working on a new website for MCSS and starting with my big school report. 

All in all - even though it was only for a far too short time, I learned a lot about turtles, terrapins, wetlands, corals, how to use drones to create maps and gained more experience than I could have at any other workplace – I am absolutely happy and pleased with my choice of school internship! 

Greetings, 

Milena 

Welcome Milena!!

Hello hello,

I'm Milena (currently 15 and studying at the European School Munich) and since my aunt Inga is working with MCSS at the time, I took the opportunity to visit her and do a two-week work experience at such an awesome, picturesque place with an important purpose, lots of experience to gain and things to learn.

I must say that I was a little surprised on my first day at the Banyan Tree, as the office was quite a tad smaller than I had expected – which isn't something negative.

Time flew by, as we collected some old traps from the Grand Police project with the canoe and sent the Phantom4 drone on a mission to take photos of the Anse Forbans wetland to later create a detailed, high quality map.

(Me flying the drone)

(Anse Forbans wetland, photo taken with drone) 

The rest of the first week was just as eventful - we went on a little Turtle patrol (it's not the season for turtles though, so we didn't see any turtles or tracks), sent the drone on more missions to complete the map of Anse Forbans, tried out our self-made bottle traps for invertebrates (not very successful...) and did some beach profiling at Anse Intendance.

I'm pretty sure next week will be no less exciting!

Until next time...

Elena's adventure with MCSS comes to an end....

After two exciting months, today is my last day with MCSS. 

During my two months internship I learned a lot about both sea turtles’ and freshwater turtles’ biology and conservation. I’m glad I could contribute a part by writing a guideline about sea turtle friendly beach management. 

I’m grateful for the experiences I made and the people I met.

I also had the chance to visit some parts of the beautiful Seychelles during my weekends and it was amazing!!

And who knows, maybe I’ll return one day after finishing my studies J

Hello from the new intern - Luana Jungmann

Hello everybody !

I joined MCSS team last week and I will be working for the Banyan Tree Project for one month. My name is Luana, I am a Brazilian-French Master student and as everyone here, I am really concerned about our nature and more precisely about marine and coastal environment.

As some of you may already know, during the nesting season sea turtles come to lay their eggs in some of the beaches in Mahé Island (Seychelles). My main goal this month will be to study which beaches are most used by turtles and to see how often each turtle goes back to the same beach both during the same nesting season and different seasons.   

In addition to that, I will be helping the conservation team with all the other activities like freshwater turtles monitoring, birds monitoring, maintenance of the conservation center and guests interaction.

I will soon post some more pictures of this adventure.

Keep both eyes on it!

Luana