hi everyone welcome to wausau island welcome to the field i'm a sea turtle biologist my name is
joe if you haven't seen my other videos i work on an island off savannah georgia and i study
nesting sea turtles the females come up on the beach to lay their eggs and we intercept them
to do our research but we also get to live in the heart of a national wildlife refuge.
you can see right behind me that's a gator pond there's about an 8 foot gator in there
sometimes you find them on the road at night but i'm super pumped for this video
because i'm going to show you what a day in the life of sea turtle biologist is like
we just took the boat in from the mainland we took our vehicles through the forest to get here we are
about to unload all our gear and prepare for the night you'll see us do all of our daily routine
as much as i can show you um and hopefully when we hit the beach tonight we'll find some turtles
um some adult females laying their eggs and maybe if we're lucky we'll find some hatchlings because
it's just that time of year where the hashings are starting to come up out of the sand so come along
with me i'll show you the ins and outs of what it's like to be a sea turtle biologist for a day
hey everyone welcome to our turtle research cabin most of the
volunteers are sleeping right now because we're going to head out to the beach at about
9 00 p.m and we'll be on the beach until about 6 a.m so i'm going to show you the cabin
it's not much to look at but it's a roof over our heads it's where i keep all of
our food it's where our volunteers hang out um it's where the staff sleeps uh this is
our home base for doing our sea turtle research we keep all our computers here all of our supplies
are here and uh this is where we're really where we call home when we're out doing field research
all right the crew is fed we're all set to go out in the beach the mules already behind me not not
horse mules but kawasaki mules we have the screens in the back ready to go then they're all gassed up
we're going to take naps before we go out and see if we can find now that everybody's had a
nap after dinner we need to go through a research orientation my project's lucky enough to involve
public volunteers in all the research that we do but before we take them on the beach
we have to teach them about the data that we collect we have to show them the data sheets
we record the data on we have to show them the sample vials that we put our samples in we have
to show them what the tags look like and how to read them we also teach them how to move
around the turtles so that everybody has a great experience not just them but also the turtles
all right it's time to look for turtles everybody's ready to go
the mules are all gassed up we're hitting the beach
under the cover of darkness we start our beach patrols and basically what we're looking for is
either a crawl left behind by a big turtle or the turtle crawling up itself and these aren't just
random patrols these are very standardized procedures that we use to systematically count
the number of nests and crawls and turtles that we see at any given night of the year
we've been doing these same kind of patrols in the same way for the last 50 years which allows
us to compare any given night within a season across any other season these kind of long-term
data are really important for understanding how sea turtle populations are changing over time
hey everyone it is uh 10 45 right now we just made our first run down the beach
didn't see any turtles checked a couple nests looking for hatchlings didn't see any action
had one nest looked like it might have had a depression which means that uh the hatchlings
that are down below are probably hatching out the eggs or making their way up and when they do that
they pull the sand above them and take it below them so it means something's going on down there
we'll check it a little bit later tonight and we'll keep checking the beach for females
all right it's about 12 30 we just got a touch space with the other crew they got a turtle
and we didn't get to see it um so we were feeling a little down but then we
took a stroll up to the south end and we came across this so if we follow this up
here
oh there she is
beautiful adult loggerhead turtle looks like she's already laying
let's check
see the eggs in there she's already laying her eggs
so this turtle might be as young as 30 years old but could be as old as 50 or 60. sometimes we
have females that lay eggs for almost 30 years so she's probably already laid a few clutches per the
in this season um she might even be getting ready to lay in her last ones
these eggs will be in the ground for probably 50 days or so
before the hatchlings hatch out of the eggs and emerge from the sand
all right turtle number two right behind us collecting data as we speak
she's got a nice big head which we love um she's popping out eggs and
she's in later nesting a great place so we don't have to relocate it which we're always
very excited about volunteers are collecting data on head size right now and body size
after turtle's latest eggs she will actually cover and then disguise the nest location so
it looks like this turtle's kind of struggling a bit but she's actually covering with her back
flippers and pounding the sand down with her shell eventually she'll start moving her front
flippers and slinging sand all over the place to disguise the nest from predators and researchers
we use these red lights on the beach because the turtle's
vision is less sensitive to the red part of the spectrum and driving with the red
lights at night has a better chance of not disturbing them during the nesting process
hi everyone it's about four o'clock in the morning and we decided to check a couple of
nests to see if there was any hatchling activity and to our surprise we got
very lucky a couple little noses sticking out and then we watched this
night's over and then we got three nests in the south end one nest on the north end and a few dry
runs that's when the turtle comes up and does not lay eggs so hopefully those girls come up tomorrow
but we're all ready to go back to the cabins and go to sleep okay so until next time until tomorrow
hey everyone thanks for watching this video i really love sharing this part
of sea turtle biology with everyone i know it's kind of a hidden side to things
um if you have any comments feel free to leave them on our on our youtube channel or on instagram
or facebook uh definitely check out some other videos from SciAll.org folks on our website
SciAll.org and check out patreon if you want to get some sneak peeks into some of our early clips
and also if you're interested in the sea turtle work that i do and that you just saw check out
www.carrettaresearchproject.org that's c-a-r-e-t-t-a my project's called the
caretta research project and you can find on our website how you can get involved thanks