Final thoughts

Being a field biologist is fascinating, amazing work. There are 7 biologists living here: Nathan, Sean, Lauren and Janelle are doing research projects, and Collin, Brett, and Lia are seasonal interns getting experience in the field. Without the help of volunteers, the staffers would have to cover all the shifts themselves and would never get a break. Even with 18 of us here covering the shifts, there is very little time during the day to catch up on sleep.

I have such respect for the biologists who work here. At this station, most of the work is done at night, when the sea turtles are more likely to nest. Each night, patrols are sent out to walk the beach, and the hatchery is monitored to watch for hatchlings and guarded from predators. In the morning the entire length of the beach is walked to look for missed turtles.

Just because they are working at night doesn't mean there aren't things that need to be done during the day - nest temperatures are taken, old nests are excavated, and biologists work on their own research. Excavations happen about every other day, and it is hard work. If the marker for the nest has been lost (Playa Grande/Tamarindo is a public beach and one of the world's most famous surfing destinations), the nest has to be triangulated and then you basically just dig for treasure*. A leatherback nests 2-3 feet deep, so that is a LOT of sand to move. And don't forget, it's around 90° F every day.
*And by treasure, I mean rotten, decaying eggs filled with maggots or dead embryos. 

I had an amazing 10 days here at the Goldring-Gund Marine Biology Station, living and working as a field biologist. Thank you so much to Earthwatch and the Leatherback Trust for the opportunity to come and share this project with my class, thanks to the biologists for making the experience absolutely life changing, and thanks to the turtles for opening my eyes to the importance of conservation and education.

THINGS I WILL NOT MISS ABOUT THE EARTHWATCH COSTA RICA SEA TURTLE PROJECT

1. Not showering. For 9 days.

2. That bleary-eyed, fuzzy headed feeling you get after not getting in a nap and patrolling all night:

Dean and me post-patrol, 2:45 AM

3. Sand in crevices. ALL the crevices.

4. Watching Nathan pop my blisters:

Hey, he IS technically a doctor......!

5. That millisecond after you open a bad one and the stench hits you:

Amy, searching for treasure

6. Getting pushed off a Ventana berm (the little sand cliffs dug out by the tide). Then getting laughed at. (Thanks, Collin and Brett!)

7. Not flushing the toilets during daylight hours because there's no running water.

8. Mosquitoes and sand fleas:

Actually, I think the sand fleas came home with me.

9. Putting on the same dirty shirt and pair of pants. Again. For the 7th night in a row.

THINGS I WILL MISS ABOUT THE EARTHWATCH COSTA RICA SEA TURTLE PROJECT

1. Having this as an office:

Nathan and me, Facetiming with my class back at LPCH

Justine, working on her blog

2. That moment on night patrol when your biologist freezes, and you realize the dark shape up ahead is a leatherback turtle.

3. This view:

Orion, helping us guard the hatchery

4. And this view:

An afternoon relaxing at Pirate's Bay beach

5. The sound of howler monkeys in the early morning.

6. Giggling all the way down the beach. (Lauren, Dean, and Amy, I'm talkin' to you!!) 

7. Trading for all the papaya (thanks Brett!!)

Getting a plate of fresh fruit every morning for breakfast!

8. Logic puzzles on night patrol. (And annoying the crap out of Collin!)

9. Watching Nathan and Sean polishing off EVERYONE's dinners:

10. These guys:

Biologists Lauren, Nathan, Sean, Collin, Lia, Jay, and Brett

11. These guys:

Adrian, Dean, Suzanne, me, Mili, Justine, Amy, and Beatrice

12. And especially these guys:

Plastics: please use responsibly!!

WARNING: 

This post contains some disturbing images or links. 

But if you're uncomfortable looking at it, just imagine how the sea turtle felt!!

One of the main controversies about the use of plastics is what happens to disposable products once we finish using them. Plastics take thousands of years to decompose, so trash that ends up in the ocean stays in the ocean.

Decaying Plastic Bag: YUCK!
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Plastic_bag_jellyfish.JPG

Moon Jellyfish: YUM!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Moon_jellyfish_at_Gota_Sagher.JPG

Most people know about the problem of plastic bags. The primary food source for leatherback sea turtles, jellyfish, look deceptively like a floating bag.

A leatherback has barbs along its throat much like a fishhook, so anything that goes down pretty much can't come back up. And plastic bags, being non-digestible, end up staying inside the turtle.

museumvictoria.com.au/about/mv-blog/categories/melbourne-museum/

--------------------------------
FUN* FACTS!! 

(*and by fun, I mean really disturbing fact that should make you think twice about how you use and dispose of plastics)

Did you know? 90% of turtles found dead on the beach have plastics within their system. So pretty much every sea turtle in the world encounters plastics.

Did you know? Studies have shown that by 2050, the amount of plastic in the ocean will be greater than the biomass. Meaning there will be more plastic than fishes.
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Not only do bags cause a problem, but so do things like the plastic straws, forks/spoons, fishing lines, and 6-pack holders that end up in the ocean. This poses a huge problem for animals like the olive ridley sea turtle, who is an omnivore - it'll eat almost anything.

photo credit: Nathan Robinson

Last summer, Nathan, Collin, Brett and Sean were working the beach when a tourist came running up to them for help. They could just make out from her panicked Spanish that there was a turtle who needed help. They ran after her, and found an olive ridley with 3 inches of plastic sticking out of her nose. When they pulled it out, they discovered it was a plastic fork, the tines too large to come out of her nostril.

In humans, the nasal passageway is located at the back of our throats but in turtles, it is on the roof of their mouth. Nathan speculates that the turtle swallowed the fork and, upon realizing it wasn't food, tried to regurgitate it, then had the handle accidentally enter the nasal passageway.

It's sad and disturbing to see it, but you can watch the entire ordeal HERE. In it, you'll see Brett and Collin holding down the turtle while Nathan pulls the fork from her nostril.

Photo credit: Nathan Robinson

Just a few months before, the team encountered a turtle with what they thought was a tube worm in his nose. After struggling a bit to get it out, they discovered it was a plastic straw.

Again, similarly difficult to watch, but the encounter can be seen HERE.

Nathan, holding the straw he pulled
out of the turtle's nose. He said he felt
awkward smiling while holding the
offending object, but then we said to
think about how happy the turtle was
when he finally got it out!

What kills me is the obvious agony these turtles are in as Nathan works to remove the foreign objects.











It's impossible not to cringe and feel just a little bit ashamed at what we, as humans, are doing to the rest of the world. You have a responsibility in the choices you make, so think twice the next time you forget to bring your reusable shopping bag, or toss out your water bottle! Conservation isn't someone else's job - it is yours and mine.

Morning Walk

The start of Morning Walk

One of the easier, cushier jobs that we might get is Morning Walk - the patrol that walks the entire length of the beach at 5AM. The walk goes from marker 6 down to the end of South at marker 36, then back to the end of Ventana at marker Ventana 11 - a total of about 6 miles - to check for any turtles that may have nested in the hours between the last patrol and dawn. The people who get the MW shift get to have a full night's sleep, usually from around 8PM until 4AM - HEAVEN!!

Yesterday, I got the Morning Walk shift, which means I finally got a full night's sleep. Mili, biologist Janelle, and I set off in the dark, and for the first time since we've been here, we saw the moon (it rises around 5AM).

We began by walking down the beach towards Tamarindo, looking for signs of an adult turtle that had come up and nested, or of smaller tracks from hatchlings who came up from the sand and crawled to the water. We started by walking quickly down the wet sand in order to catch any stray turtles, which is much easier than walking on dry sand. But on the way back, we kept to the high-tide line, where the sand is softer and walking is much more difficult. It definitely makes for a buns-of-steel workout!

Halfway back to the hatchery, we found a new olive ridley track:


This project is in the care of the Leatherback Trust, so the patrols are timed specifically for leatherbacks - we walk down the beach for 20 minutes, rest for 20, then walk back for 20. This means a spot on the beach can be monitored every hour, thus catching every leatherback (they take well over an hour, often 2 hrs, to nest). Olive ridley and black turtles, on the other hand, nest much faster so we often see them when they are returning to the water, or miss them entirely and know about them only by their tracks.



We recorded the location of the nest, noting the distance from vegetation and closest location marker before continuing down to Ventana.






During my Ventana night patrol, we'd seen a huge migration of hermit crabs. Hundreds of crabs were crawling up out of the water - it was nearly impossible to continue on without stepping on one. Biologist Collin said he sees that phenomenon there quite often. Janelle thinks that because the location is almost always in front of one of the beachfront properties, it may be because there is a sewage leak out of the house and the crabs are there to feed. Basically, she was saying we were walking over poo.

Hermit crab tracks

Further along the beach, was the old leatherback track from the turtle we saw during our Ventana patrol with Collin (it had come up and wandered around near the beachfront houses, but decided she didn't like what she saw and returned to the ocean):

At the very end of Ventana Beach is an estuary, where two nights ago the Ventana night patrol had seen crocodile tracks. We didn't find a croc, but there were plenty of Great Herons hanging out:








Overall, Morning Walk is really pleasant and often patrols see cool things. The patrol this morning saw a sea snake...! They usually come up if something is wrong - they might be sick or old - but the one they saw seemed fairly alert so Sean decided to put it back in the water. Sea snakes are highly venomous, but Sean is an Australian biologist, and like your typical Aussie outdoor adventurer, he wrestled it back into the water.

So macho, right?!

Costa Rican Wildlife

We're here  primarily to work with leatherback, olive ridley, and black (green) sea turtles, but there is an abundance of wildlife in this area. Yesterday, we took a tour on the Estuaro de Playa Grande.

There is amazing bird life here in Costa Rica. Here are just a few of the species we saw:

This cormorant had dreams of grandeur...
the fish he caught was WAY bigger than his head,
and eventually he had to let it go...

Tri-colored Heron

Yellow-crowned Night-Heron

Common black hawk in flight -
note the stripes on his tail

Common Black Hawk

Not only did we see birds, but we hunted for crocodiles as well. There are estuaries on both ends of the beach - to the north at the end of Ventana, and to the south between Playa Grande and Tamarindo. What we are looking for are saltwater crocs, who sometimes go onto the beach or swim in the ocean. In fact, one of the other Ventana night patrols saw croc tracks leading from the estuary over to the beach, right next to where they take their breaks. In the Playa Grande estuary, we only saw one:

He quickly slipped back into the water...

 We are also always excited to see howler monkeys:

Howler monkeys

Along the street walking to dinner, we see howler monkeys (and in the mornings we can hear them too). This guy was directly over our heads when he got mad at us:

Howling howler monkey

The nice thing is that we don't really have to go far for wildlife. Here at the station, we're visited by a variety of different animals.

This Hoffman's Woodpecker comes out every morning

White-throated Magpie-Jay

Great Kiskidae

Great-tailed Grackle drink in our pool every day

We also have our resident Ctenosaur (Spinytail iguana) that hangs out by the bodega (the little storage shed in the yard where we keep the hatchlings and other supplies), who we've nicknamed Tiny Tim: 

as well as tons butterflies, dragonflies, grasshoppers, and other insects:

Eek! A scorpion! Even creepier at night,
when we're only allowed to use red light.

This poor stickbug lost one of his front legs

The project might be the charge of the Leatherback Trust, but we've definitely had our share of other animals!

Excavation of #IS013 - an unhatched leatherback nest

Yesterday afternoon we went to the beach to excavate a 70-day old leatherback nest. Normally, turtles incubate for about 60 days before they hatch. The nests will then be dug up to gather data, and any remaining turtles who haven't reached the surface will be released. In the case of this nest, there was no sign of hatchlings on the due date so after waiting 10 days, the biologists decided to excavate.

Biologist Brett walked us down to marker 10 and easily found the nest, marked by a small pile of upright sticks. The first step was to clear off the dry sand to prevent a collapse after we started working down in the egg chamber.

Measuring the depth of the topmost eggs: 61 cm

We then started digging, looking for the first sign of eggs. When the first egg is spotted, we stop digging to measure the depth. 













Then it was time to collect. Brett and I removed the eggs, putting them up onto the sand. It wasn’t as easy as it sounds – leatherbacks are huge animals, and the nest was close to 3 feet deep. Brett had longer arms (and more experience!) than I, so I had to fight to not fall into the nest and crush all the now-rotten eggs. When we got everything out, we re-measured the depth to find out the depth of the original egg chamber (76 cm - about 2.5 feet down).

I almost fell in!!

     Thank goodness for Justine!!


After measuring the final depth of the chamber, the eggs were sorted by Milixza and Alan, who pulled out all the SAGs. SAGs are shelled albumen globes, unviable eggs that are filled with egg whites but have no embryo. A few are the size of the regular eggs, but most are much smaller - some as small as grapes. We threw those back into the egg chamber and counted the remaining eggs. Of those, one had actually hatched, and we needed to stage the remaining eggs.

Brett sifting through the rotten egg, looking for an embryo

One egg had pipped, meaning the hatchling was fully developed and had started breaking out of its shell but didn't make it. For the rest, we opened the egg by pinching the shell between our fingernails and tearing it open much like you’d open a potato chip bag. One by one, Brett, Mili, Alan and I opened the eggs to find out what stage development the embryo had reached while Justine recorded all the data in the logbook. The first few eggs I opened were completely mushy inside (one was even crawling with maggots), and Brett had to carefully sift through the rotting goo in an attempt to find an embryo. If we couldn’t tell what it was, it was considered “unknown”.

Getting our chance to stage eggs

A Stage 3

The majority (66) of the eggs were fairly far along in their development, meaning they had reached stage 3.  Some had been liquified by some sort of bacteria or other factor and we could only tell by the splotches of black in the goo that there had been anything,  but more often it was just a formed embryonic hatchling. When we were done, the nest - with all the SAGs and opened shells - was covered back up.

The logbook of data. "IS" nests are "in situ," meaning they are in their original positions on the beach. "H" nests were relocated into the hatchery. Note the success rate of the IS nests... not so great...

Because so many of the eggs had gotten fairly far in their development, Brett speculates that one possible reason for their demise was the temperature was too high – this area of Costa Rica is suffering from a major drought, exacerbated by the El Niño. This season, the leatherback nests on the beach have not been doing well - in general around 50% of leatherback nests are successful, but this year the number is way lower - around 15-20%. 

Anyone who doesn't think climate change is a thing, come down and visit the sea turtles...