Turtles visit crowded beach

Tony Tucker, program manager for Mote Marine Laboratory's Sea Turtle Research Conservation Program, prepares to put a dive computer on a green sea turtle that crawled on the beach Sunday morning on Casey Key, but failed to lay eggs। Mote is doing research on sea turtles, which includes putting satellite tags and other tracking devices on the marine animals. The red light is used because sea turtles cannot see it as well and it does not disorient them. Where's Sweet Pea?Friday night, the female green sea turtle came ashore on Casey Key, decided for some reason not to lay her eggs — that's what scientists call a "false crawl" —and returned to the Gulf of Mexico.On Saturday, she was about 2 miles offshore, came ashore at 12:30 a.m. Sunday for another false crawl, went about a mile offshore Sunday, came ashore again Sunday night for her third false crawl in three days, and Monday was close to shore about 4 miles north of her Sunday landing site. Andrew West/news-press.comA green sea turtle is detained while scientists from Mote Marine Laboratory put a tracking device on it Sunday morning. Sea turtle volunteers got a look at the large, rare turtle. We know about Sweet Pea's travels because Mote Marine Laboratory researchers glued a satellite tag to her shell during her Friday night false crawl.Sarasota-based Mote has tagged 17 sea turtles this year and 30 dating back to 2005, all have been loggerheads except Sweet Pea — five sea turtle species nest along Florida's Gulf coast; green, leatherback, hawksbill and Kemp's ridley sea turtles are endangered, and loggerheads are listed as threatened. "Satellite tagging is the best tool to answer where a turtle is," said Tony Tucker, manager of Mote's Sea Turtle Conservation and Research Program. "Well, duh. It's a simple question, but it it has a profound outcome. It tells us where they're moving and what threats they face."For example, scientists knew that red tide affects sea turtles, but one of Mote's satellite turtles, named Ariel, swam through a patch of red tide and died in October 2006, giving the scientists what Tucker called "smoking-gun proof" of the effects of red tide on sea turtles.Two other Mote turtles, Yertle and Casey, ended up off the Yucatan Peninsula, where turtles are still harvested. "Sea turtles spend 1 percent of their lives on shore," Tucker said. "We need to know where they are the other 99 percent of the time."The sound bite is: It's 12 o'clock, do you know where your children are? What I want to know is where my turtles are. There are a host of new questions we can pose by saying, 'Where are they at this point in time?'"When a turtle comes ashore, everybody involved gets busy doing what needs to be done, but sea turtle tagging is not all excitement.Mote researchers and volunteers got to Casey Key at 9 a.m. Saturday. Researchers took turns riding all terrain vehicles north and south while everybody else sat in the sand under a full moon. Finally, at 12:34 a.m., the call came in: Sweet Pea had returned to Casey Key in southern Sarasota County, about one-half mile south of her first false crawl.Before the volunteers trooped off toward the sea turtle, technician Jaime Budzynkiewicz told them the rules: No flash photography, no white light (flashlights with red filters were OK because sea turtles can't see red light), quiet voices, no questions for researchers until the work was done. This time Sweet Pea crossed the entire beach, reached a row of vegetation, turned around and started back toward the Gulf.Before she reached the water, researchers put a large, wooden enclosure around her and went to work. They needed to replace a dive computer they'd put on the turtle Saturday. Dive computers tell researchers at what depths sea turtles are spending their time."We squeeze everything we can out of every turtle," Tucker said. "We have about 16 different studies going." Besides satellite tags and dive computers, sea turtles also get radio transmitters, red-tide samplers, cow-ear tags, temperature/depth recorders and passive integrated transponder tags. A PIT tag is a microchip inserted under the skin that can be read by an electronic receiver."That's about a $3,800 turtle," Tucker said of the gadget-packed Sweet Pea. That money comes from grants.On top of all the hardware, researchers take a small biopsy from turtles for genetic testing, scrape barnacles from the turtles' shells and send them to the Yale Museum for classification, recover dead hatchlings for genetic and heavy metal tests and are conducting an experiment to see whether hot pepper keeps coyotes and raccoons away from sea turtle nests.

Aaron White, a doctoral student at Florida A&M University, uses the yolks of undeveloped sea turtle eggs to compare the heavy metal content in Atlantic sea turtles and Gulf sea turtles. "Gulf turtles have higher levels than Atlantic turtles," White said. "There's not enough data yet to say, 'Oh, they have this level, and it's going to cause problems.' The theory for the higher levels is that the Gulf has more sources of pollution than the Atlantic — you've got the Mississippi River that drains half the country — and it's a semi-closed system."Mote volunteers, who monitor beaches for new sea turtle nests every morning during nesting season, watched, enthralled as the scientists worked on the turtle in the bright moonlight and alien-encounter glow of red light. "Yes, we get up before dawn every day we walk the beach," volunteer Rusty Holmes said. "When we find a nest, it's like, 'Oh, oh, we found one.' It's thrilling, and we really keep an eye on that nest because it's our nest."But tonight is great, too. I would have been thrilled to see a loggerhead, but seeing a green makes it extra special."At about 1:30, the researchers finished with Sweet Pea and removed the wooden enclosure. She spent the next five minutes and 23 seconds laboriously hauling herself 60 feet to the water's edge, then gracefully disappeared into the silvery Gulf."This is the first time we'll know where a green is going," Tucker said. "This is part of the great journey."