Excavator Extraordinaire

So this happened...

The olive ridley nest from yesterday had pretty much finished hatching, so it was time to dig it up and gather data on the eggs. We scooped up the sand from the pit, dumping it into a sifter and pulling out the shell fragments, unhatched eggs, and any remaining turtles.

Olive ridley eggs are about the size of golf balls (leatherback eggs are billiard-ball-sized) and are not hard like chicken eggs - instead, they are slightly squishy. After rescuing all the stragglers, we sorted the shells, counting anything larger than half a shell and discarding the smaller bits. The whole eggs we set aside in a separate pile.













Then it was time to stage the eggs: figuring out what stage development the unhatched eggs had reached. To do so, we put on gloves and tore open the eggs. If we found nothing, the egg was considered stage zero. Several of the eggs that we opened were just like a raw egg (clear liquid with a yellow yolk), or was a soupy mush, or had a reddish tinge indicating bacteria growth. Some were pretty rotten and smellllllly!! Others had actually started developing...

Stage 2

Pipped

An embryo with no eye development but with blood vessels is stage 1, an embryo with a developed eye but no pigment is stage 2, and an embryonic turtle with pigment is a stage 3. Any turtle who broke open his shell but didn't get out is considered "pipped."





Here's biologist Nathan opening an unhatched egg and finding a Stage 3:

It was kind of sad seeing so many unhatched babies, but then we played with the bucket o' hatchlings and I felt better...