Just a few days ago I made it back down to St. Catherines Island (SCI). This will be my second summer spent on SCI, and I thought that all the wildlife on the island deserved a chance to shine. St. Catherines is a privately owned barrier island off the coast of Georgia. It is bordered by Ossabaw to the north and Sapelo to the south. I'm hired by Georgia Southern University as a Sea Turtle Program Researcher. Here I act as part of a team that has been aiding the St. Catherines's sea turtles for 26 years. Here are some of the things I see while on the island.
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| Waiting on the dock for the daily 0730 boat to the island. |
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| Saying goodbye to the mainland. |
Soon after my arrival on the island, we made our way to the beaches to complete our daily patrol. While here, we look for crawlways that indicate that a female sea turtle has come up from the ocean to attempt to lay a nest. We follow the paths of these crawlways to the nest location.
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| Part of a loggerhead sea turtle (Caretta caretta) crawlway on her way to lay her nest on the beach. |
Here is part of a crawl way that marks a mama turtle's path up the beach from the ocean. More pictures with better lighting to come later.
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| We've confirmed that this is a nest. 16-065r (the 65th documented nest on St. Catherines during 2016). Women's 9.5 foot for scale. |
Habitat loss is a problem for St. Catherines beaches. Rising sea levels result in higher tides which in turn erode beaches. The places where turtles used to nest no longer exist. Because of this, we occasionally have to relocate nests to better habitat on the beach. In this case, the original nest site was in a location where spring high tides (the highest of high tides) would wash over the nest. Reptile eggs need to breathe, and if they are washed over by high tides they can drown.
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| Eggs from nest 16-065r. |
We carefully extracted all of the eggs from the original nest site. We placed all 117 of them into a bucket with cool sand and relocated them to a newly dug nest. We have studied the shape of loggerhead nests and are able to recreate the dimensions naturally created by nesting females. In other words, we channel our inner mama turtle and dig a new nest so these eggs can continue to incubate safely.
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| Egg used for DNA analysis. |
We take a single egg from each clutch of eggs laid. That egg is used for DNA analysis. Dr. Brian Shamblin at the University of Georgia conducts the analysis and can tell us which female lays each nest. This data show us how our conservation efforts are paying off (see article on Dr. Shamblin's work
here).
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| Here is a look at the crawlway up to the nest. |
It's amazing the nesting season we've had so far. Last year I arrived on the island June 1st, 2015. By the end of that day, we had finished with nest 15-046r. This year, exactly one year later we finished June 1st, 2016 off with nest 16-066. The work isn't always easy, but we're here to serve the turtles. Stay tuned for more turtley pictures and other wildlife happenings.
