Day 5 - nest excavation and Night Survey

Yesterday I got back from a night survey and read my book in the morning. In the afternoon we went to Levera for my first nest excavation - this is where we dig up nests we know to have hatched and look at how many hatched and how many didn’t etc - an incredibly stinky and tiring job! When we arrived on the beach we used the triangulated location to locate where we expected the nests we were excavating. We marked out 5 nest locations using the cross over points of the measuring tapes from the markers at the back of the beach. Kate started digging one herself, Mandy and Poppy worked together and Steph and I worked together. It wasn’t long before Steph and I reached the first egg, she showed me how you can tell where the nest was dug by feeling how hard the sand is below, when it’s soft you’re in the right place. We dug down with our hands to uncover the top eggs, checking the sides to make sure there were none above this. We then used a contraption if two sticks tied with a thin thread, by putting the two sticks in the sand at the top of the nest horizontally to form a straight line at the top of the nest, this gave us a point to measure too. We then took the measuring tape from the top of the nest to the thread to measure it. The eggs are sooooo smelly!

It was then my job to (wearing gloves) remove all the eggs from the nest, carefully as not to pop them, and sort them into hatched, I hatched and yolkless. Once that was done we counted the number of each and then threw the hatched and yolkless eggs back into the hole. We noted that there were no live or dead hatchlings in the nest. We noted there were no pipped hatchlings, which is when they’ve half hatched (either dead or alive). I was then given the job of carefully opening the unhatched (smells even worse), if they are just grey or yellow inside they are recorded as NSGD (No signs of growth of development) which are eggs that didn’t develop for whatever reason. NSGD with cooking which is when they look a bit scrambled from the heat in the nest. NSGD with bacteria which is a bright pink colour. A few eggs also had an embryo inside some <5mm, some <5->2mm some >2cm and any that were larger than the yolk were full term. We also opened some that were degraded and you could see little bones of the turtles that were broken down. Any eggs that were open but not dry and hatched were recorded as unknown. We then also measured the depth of the whole nest to the bottom and noted any eggs that had signs of beetle predation. 

This was repeated on four of the nests, some were easier to find than others, a huge hole was dug in the wrong place before remesuring and finding it as well. Once we had finished dangling our heads down smelly nest holes we filled in the nests making sure all the eggs contents etc were inside so the nutrients is retained in the beach. 

When we got back it was dinner time so I quickly showered to get the smell off me and ate veg fried rice, oven roasted veg, pumpkin soup and flatbread that Tom cooked. We ate inside due to a high volume of blister bugs flying around so we sat in a circle on the floor inside ‘family style’ as Tom called it 😊.

I was then off on another night survey, with Poppy, Talitha, a girl from the local college called Xia who is doing 3 nights for community service for school credits and two local staff Praggi and Lawson. Xia and Talitha went out first but didn’t see any nesting but a few hatchlings. Poppy and I didn’t see any nesting on the way across the beach but I found a hatching on it’s back so flipped him over and hoped he made it to the sea. When we got to the end we had our half hour wait and saw another hatchling struggling so we slowly guided it to the sea, it kept getting stuck in foot prints and seaweed. Eventually the little guy managed to get there! So cute :) it was very slow though I don’t think it’ll stand much of a chance in the sea, but it made it  😊.The sky was very pretty, lots of stars, I even saw 2 shooting stars! Mandy had told us you can see Jupiter at the moment, I saw what looked like a very big bright star so maybe that could have been Jupiter. I saw some constellations 🌌 too 😊. On our patrol back across the beach we came across a female nesting, I counted the eggs and Poppy was scribe and a tour group came to watch.  Whilst this was happening another female came up further along the beach so when we finished with the first female we headed straight over but she attempted a nest and returned to the water without laying. Another female also came up behind us so we went back and counted her eggs and took her measurements and details. The first female was unusual because she dug a very shallow nest and laid 73 eggs and over 40 yolkless on top, normally they lay a few yolkless. The 3rd turtle was unusual as well because her nest was incredibly deep but she only laid 22 eggs and no yolkless. We didn’t see any more turtles for the rest of the night though, we did another run later that night and raked over the nests in the morning. Xia and I measured the distances of the nests from the markers. 

There’s a picture below of the Hut we sleep in at the beach.