1/ Fungineer
2/ Brand Strategist
3/ Storyteller

STEPHANIE WANDKE

1/ Fungineer
2/ Brand Strategist
3/ Storyteller

Mexico

December 26, 2011

Tiny Turtles

I guess you could say 2011 turned into the Year of the Turtle for me! Alyssa chose our volunteer project long beforeand I am still learning much about the long lives and longer evolutionary history of these intruiging creatures!

Sea turtles spend most of their life swimming the vast oceans of our planet…some traveling thousands of miles each year! Their migration patterns are only being discovered recently, and most of what we know is learned from the female turtles that return to their beaches of birth to nest sometime after their 20th birthday! It is now thought that they are able to return to their birthplace because of a magnetic and earth’s angle imprinting that happens within the baby turtles first moments of life.

After spending 45-60 days in a nest buried deep in the warm wet sands, the hatchlings begin a 5 day process of breaking out of their eggs and working their way to the surface. The sex of the hatchlings is determined by the temperatures of the nests – anything below 26C will not incubate, between 26-28C you will get all males, and only nests above 28 degrees have a chance at producing females! The wiggling and hatching and warmth of brothers and sisters stimulate the rest of the nest to start hatching and the babies pop out of the beach and hit the ground running towards the ocean. There are many obstacles and predators awaiting these little guys – from birds to foxes, from plastic to boxes – only about 1 in 1,000 will make it to mating adulthood. Many of them are going to die today! The day they are born! So one of the things we are here to do is to try and alleviate the pressures caused by The Human Factor.

Sea turtles are one of the oldest living species on this planet. Actually, maybe they are THE oldest. They’ve been around for over 200 MILLION YEARS! Not only is the turtle a dinosaur, it was on earth BEFORE the dinosaurs! Wow! They have lived through Ice Ages, meteorites of epic size and damage, and the making of our continents…..Now That’s Incredible – we have fossil evidence that turtles were swimming the oceans when it was just one ocean! They lived and saw Pangaea !!! (when all the Earth’s land was a supercontinent!) I am really in awe about this! And think it quite funny that we even think there could be The Human Factor…how egotistical to think that we could extinct so hardy a species….yet we’re doing our damnedest.

First you have the beaches… where a turtle’s life starts. Lights disrupt the orientation of hatchlings and they get lost on their journey to the life sustaining sea. For millions of years their instinct has guided them to the light – a star’s reflection on the water. But in the last century, electricity – even distant city glows – causes confusion in those first turtle steps. Big developments disrupt beaches in innumerous ways via dredging, filling, and massive concrete erosion walls. Even that row of lounge chairs on the beach is an obstacle blocking a female from the ideal nesting spot. Then you have the plastic. Over 75% of turtles are found with plastic in their stomachs. Especially balloons that look like their favorite meal, jellyfish! Next you have the commercial fishing nets. How many turtles are accidentally caught in nets? Long lines? (when they lay out 60 miles of line with thousands of hooks looking to catch swordfish, mahimahi, and makerel….usually catching/killing a lot of turtles, seals, and sharks on accident.)

OK. So we are making some negative impacts. And combined, they So even though I think they will out-survive humans too, Alyssa and I are here working on a small project that is both assisting turtles still trying to nest in a busy tourist beach area, and collecting data and observations to help assist the scientific community to figure out more about these amazing creatures.

Here on the Pacific beaches of Baja California, we are monitoring and helping with the olive ridley hatchlings and awaiting the final nesting of two leatherbacks. These ladies were scheduled to arrive on Christmas, but now it’s the day after (11 days since her last nest) and she still hasn’t returned. This means that German (pronounced Her-mann) is going out each night every other hour and looking for her tracks so that we can mark and move the nest.