Week 2 & 3 Costa Rica! Excavation, Jaguars, Kayaking and New people

I'm a bit late to posting this blog as I've been super busy with writing up my project. I've now been in Costa Rica for three weeks in total which has absolutely flown by. Since my last blog post a lot has happened. I've been on many night patrols, as we hit the peak nesting season we're now sometimes seeing over 200 nests a night on each side Boca/Park, just the northmost 8km of the beach! My record for number of turtles worked in a night is now 11, compared to the 4 I had the week before! Its been really fun to get out and do lots of hands on fieldwork and build my confidence in tagging and PIT tagging the turtles. The moon has been a lot brighter at night which has been much nicer at night and the weather this week has been a lot nicer. My project supervisor Roldan also came back to the centre at the beginning of last week just for a few days, and we had a really fun afternoon all playing frisbee on the beach. 

Last week we had Ian from the Coastal Jaguar Conservation project (CJC) on site with us and he gave us daily presentations about his Jaguar research which was really cool. He uses camera traps to do Jag ID and has built up a catalgue of all of the Jaguars living in the national park. He gave talks on camera traps, jaguar social dynamics and interactions, protocol of what to do if you see a Jaguar on the beach, Jaguar Scat, Predator Prey dynamics, the history of the CJC and an overview of the papers they've published. He was staying for the week whilst he had to check his camera traps along the trail here at Tortuguero which he does monthly, unfortunately my schedule clashed with all of his surveys so I didn't manage to get out onto the beach with him for a survey but his talks were really interesting. Although I'm glad we had the Jag protocol talk because that evening I was on Patrol with Sebas and Kyle working a turtle close to the vegetation and we heard a Jaguar! I didn't see it but we walked slowly backwards towards the sea and made our way back towards the centre, only working turtles from around marker 5.4, it was quite exciting and scary at the same time! Some of the others saw a Jaguar and its cub one morning on a morning camera trap survey which sounded really cool.

One highlight of the past couple weeks was getting to watch a green turtle necropsy on the beach when I was doing a morning track survey with Sebas last week. It was a really hot morning and we were counting the tracks and nests from the previous night along Park when we found a freshly dead turtle that had been killed that night, it was surrounded by vultures and we had to keep an eye on the vegetation to make sure there wasn't a Jaguar nearby ready to come back to eat it yet. The protocol for finding a dead turtle is to take a GPS, mark it as Jag kill and check the turtle for any tags and remove them if she does have them and then measure her. This turtle didn't have any tags but we measured her and went to move on when we saw a guy approaching us who happens to be doing research on the turtles by dissecting any turtles killed by Jaguars and taking samples of their ovaries and stomach contents. He told us we could help and watch if we wanted too, I didn't have my camera with me (luckily or unluckily) so I don't have any photos but It was really  interesting to see all the follicles that were waiting to become yolks of eggs inside, she also had a pretty empty stomach but no plastic or anything inside. 

Last week four ecovolunteers all left the centre but we also gained six new research assistants who will be taking over from the current research assistants next week, they've been completing their training the last week and are going out on their first night patrol tonight. We've gained Jonty (M) from the UK, Tyler (M), Aidan (F) and Krista (F) from the US and Marcella (F) and Daniel (M) from Costa Rica. I've also moved from my room on my own, into a room with all of the other girls as there was space after one of the other research assitants left the week before. Suu has now finished her Covid isolation and the new research assistant girls have moved in with her.

This week we did our first excavation of a green turtle nest. Unfortunately it had a 0% hatch success, we're not too sure why but Keilor said it might be because of some storms they had last month. But we opened up all of the unhatched eggs to determine their stages and nearly all of the embryos were around a stage 2 with fungus infestation. The hatching success of green turtles here is actually on average normally around 80-90% which is much higher than the leatherbacks I worked with before so hopefully there will be better hatch success for the next nest we excavate.

 

This week I also went Kayaking on the river into the national park with Becca, Sebas, Mildred, Laura and Aniol. It was a really lovely afternoon and we saw lots of wildlife including a Cayman, Howler monkeys, Spider Monkeys, Capuchins, Boat billed Herons, Cormoront and Iguana. I've also seen lots of different animals after morning survey like agouti and Crimon-collared tanager, South american bittern etc. I've also been seeing lots of wildife at the centre including a huge Iguana, hummingbird, toucans

Yesterday we went to a swimming pool at a local hotel and had a welcome party/goodbye party for the new research assitants and the current research assistants which was really nice and good fun, and also the first night since I've been here that no one had a night patrol. 

I'm back out on patrol tonight at 8pm till midnight so hopefully we see lots of turtles.