Flashback - Sampling Trip South Pacific, Illnesses & August Arribada
I have been very quiet for the past weeks. It was a busy time with little internet and electricity at times. Additionally, we have been battling some illnesses amongst us that have been a constant companion during this field season. After we fought off the nasty stomach bug that passed from one person to the other in the beginning of the season, and Hunter had his second degree sun burn, we were plagued by a variety of ailments, including infected toe nails, and weird infected heat rushes. The latest highlight was a conjunctivitis epidemic in Ostional that was passed on to us by the children in our host families. Fun times! Luckily we are all more or less back to healthy.
After the July arribada we headed down South to the Peninsula Osa, back to the project in Rio Oro run by COTORCO. We spent two weeks down there patrolling the beach for solitary nesting females on Playa Carate and Rio Oro to collect samples and other data points.
This year we are lucky enough to be among a chosen few that were given two satellite transmitters to try out by TELONICS, which are using the Iridium satellite system rather than the standard ARGOS network. We were able to install one of these units onto one female in Rio Oro and his already given us amazing data.
While in Rio Oro we are staying at Hacienda Rio Oro, which provides a camp-style living experience in the midst of some cow pastures surrounded by pristine rain forest. Scarlett macaws are flying over our heads every day and at night the frogs deliver a deafening concert. The beaches in the Osa remind me a lot of the beaches in the Caribbean, where I started my sea turtle career. The jungle meets the ocean only divided by sandy beaches, stretching hundreds of kilometers along the coastline. No houses or other developments are directly on the beach.
While we were in Rio Oro, we had the pleasure to welcome the photojournalist Eileen Cho into the project. She will be writing a story about our sea turtle work in Costa Rica and we are all looking forward to the results that are meant to be published in March 2018.
On one of our last days down South, we went out on the boat to see humpback whales with my old Captain Taboga, whom I worked with during my time studying dolphins and humpback whales in Golfo Dulce.
The waters of Golfo Dulce provide ideal conditions to humpback whale females for birthing and nursing their calves. And since the ladies are here the competing males are not far. We were lucky to see a group of competing males splashing around, chasing, and singing, and later on three different females with babies (one of them less than a week old).
After our time in Rio Oro we drove up North again to Ostional to wait for the August arribada. While driving back we were surprised by a cold front that brought monsoon-like rainfalls.
On the last leg entering Ostional (15 minutes to go), we were about to cross a bridge that was completely flooded, when we lost our footing and our right front tire slipped off the bridge’s edge and into a hole. A quite interesting sensation… It has to be said that it was entirely my fault, because I trusted the word of a stranger that told that there was no problem crossing instead of getting out of the car and testing the waters myself. Well, hindsight is always 20/20. We had a long drive down and dinner was already waiting. Luckily, in Costa Rica nobody will leave you in the literal ditch. Several nice people immediately rushed to our help and in the end the strong Toyota truck of three nice guys pulled Hercules out of the water. They also gave me a ride to the next mechanic that was able to fix Hercules, because he didn’t want to start after the foot space ran full of water and impeded the electronics from working properly. Hercules is back up and running and nobody was hurt in the process. #FieldWorkFailures.
But we made it made it safe to Ostional after all, and during the following days I picked up the new set of RAs (Candice Olivier, Kim Lato, and Brittney Traynor) that will spend the second half of the season with me and Cody installing satellite transmitters along the entire Costa Rican Pacific coast.
The arribada was punctual, and I used the early evening hours to train the new RAs, which was partially documented in a live video (here) before my phone died.
During the August arribada we finally recaptured our females that we had captured and marked in-water in the beginning of the season in July. We recaptured a total of 20 females (of 47 previously marked ones).
Thanks to our presence on the beach we were also able to provide other projects and colleagues with recapture data. We recaptured a total of 9 turtles previously marked in Ostional, 8 turtles from PRETOMA beaches, which are to the South of Ostional, and 15 turtles of a colleague that is also doing her PhD work at Ostional beach. Collaboration is a very important aspect in our line of work, because we will never be able to collect the kind of data we do and see the bigger picture of such a highly mobile species we are working by just sticking to our own data.
While spending four full nights walking the beach from 17:00 till 6:00 in the morning, I decided that I will start to document the “ugly” side of the arribada in a more structured fashion. We have a high rate of females that are in one way or another affected by anthropogenic pollution of the oceans, and it is probably a good visual representation of what is happening in our oceans on a broader scale.
In just the first night we found three females with fishing hooks stuck in or to their bodies, and two females partially entangled in fishing line, dragging huge coils and buoys with them. The second night we had three entangled turtles and the craziest entanglement we had during the third night, where Andrey found a female that was dragging an entire fishing rod behind her. In total we had five fishing hook incidents, and 11 fishing line entanglements during the August arribada.
During the second night in the early morning hours, we were able to attach the second Iridium unit to a female in Ostional. We did it live on FB and you can re-watch it right here and here.
Right now we are back in the Southern part of the country hitting up different nesting beaches, and I hope I will have time to post another blog update soon!
