"July" Arribada and the March of the Zombies

After several days of waiting and increased efforts of listening to our radio tagged turtles, the arribada finally came.

"Left-overs" from the night.....tracks over tracks

The night of Sunday we were able to start working and we had three teams on the beach.

The first team (through which we rotated in shifts) was on the beach with the antenna from 4pm till 6am listening and trying find to our radio tagged turtles in case they come up and checking other turtles for our tags and painted T.

The two other teams were on the beach “only” six hours, three hours before and three hours after high tide. One of them was a stationary ultrasounding/weighing team, which we set up in the epicenter of the arribada conveniently under a tree and surrounded by drift wood so no turtles could stampede over our equipment. The other one was a mobile team, which worked toward the stationary team and while they were busy with a turtle worked other turtles in between.

Besides our field team we had a bunch of extra help from the volunteers of the olive ridley population monitoring project (namely Freya, Jasmine, Claudia, Carsten, Mallory, Alannah, Shawna, Natalie, Alyssa, Shillo, and Callie), who helped to count eggs, restrain and carry turtles, and finding turtles. Thanks a bunch guys! You rock!!

That way we were able to work a total of 51 turtles, of which were 41 new and 10 were recaptures, from the previous arribada (n=2) and from the boat (2 radio tagged, 6 painted).

The recaptures are especially valuable to us and caused us sleepless nights, because we didn’t know if we would be able to recapture any of them while nesting, especially the ones tagged on the boat.

For those among you that are interested to know why we even want to recapture females: we are trying something that is called repeated sampling. We are interested to follow a number (hopefully) individual females throughout their nesting season (starting @ the beginning while they are just done mating) to answer the question how certain hormones circulate and change within a female of a wild population in the course of an entire nesting season, as well as her body condition. This part of our project is the most unpredictable one and we have already been called “ambitious” diplomatically, and some of our colleagues cracked jokes about “n=1” studies. Hence, our n=8 is incredible!

We were also very excited to see two of our radio tagged turtles again. The first that came up to nest (Rena) showed her face in the first night of the arribada, when everybody had already left the beach to go to sleep and I stayed behind with Andrey and the antenna to listen and sample a few more females. While I was just about done with the sampling and tagging of a female all of a sudden a very strong pulse started in my earphones (stronger than usual) and I ran toward the area the signal seemed to come from, because it became a lot louder and stronger……and there she was…..just emerging from the water among a big group of other females. What a joy! When she started laying I took a blood sample, and Brie came running to ultrasound her (I had called her).

Unfortunately, our two last tagged females, had been around but didn’t come up. The last night of the arribada, where only about 20 females nested at once, we went out only with the antenna and the purpose to find “Yamileth” and “Andreina”, but we didn’t get lucky. Brie (who was on the late patrol around the high tide) found two more of our painted turtles though. Toward the end of the arribada the beach is dominated by females the locals call “teletones”, females that are a bit kooky……not as fit…unable to dig egg chambers…..with missing limbs….and other problems.

Well, that said...

All in all a very successful arribada!

Somewhere in the middle of all the craziness our amazing field assistant MJ left us and our new (equally amazing) field assistant Kim Lato arrived.

A funny story on the side. The second night we came to our “station” under the tree, a dog almost jumped into my face, which had seemingly slept within our makeshift enclosure, and after a shock second a naked man rose from a sleeping mat right next to him. He was surrounded by about 7 people loaded with equipment staring down at him confused. Turns out it was a photographer waiting for the perfect shot, but we had to make him leave because we needed the space…..awkward moments while he was getting dressed and leaving his toilet paper behind in his haste.

Since we did several nights of all-nighters and we were only walking Zombies at the end, I took the field team to the hot springs close to us. We spent a day soaking in the hot waters while it was pouring down. Well-deserved and glorious!