Turtle Night Work on Ascension

Turtle night work – deploying temperature data loggers Night work is my favourite part of working with sea turtles. 23rd January marked our first evening of turtle night work of the season. Here on Ascension we are deploying five temperature loggers at each of the three mainly monitored nesting beaches each month, which usually takes around one week each month to complete, and will continue through until around June. 

Monday 23rd January– Toby showed Anna, Abi and I how to launch the Tiny Talks (the data loggers) and what equipment we needed to bring with us. This included two buckets each containing a measuring tape, marker pen, data sheet, tinytalk dataloggers, pencil, radio and GPS shared between us. I then spent the afternoon creating spreadsheets to collate all our night work data and keep track of ID numbers of temperature loggers being deployed. Monday’s night work took place on Long beach. 

We met Toby at the conservation office at 8:30pm as we had a tour with governor and Administrator first. Abi assisted Toby with the Tour and Anna and I acted as turtle spotters. When the tour was over we then moved onto deploying data loggers, we needed to find turtles that had just begun laying and deploy the logger when the turtle was around halfway through laying her eggs. One thing I really liked about working on long beach was how much you could see, the sand is a lot lighter than in Costa Rica where I was before, and the moon a lot brighter so we could see pretty well without needing to turn on our red torches until we were working the turtles. We also needed to make sure we are only deploying loggers in nests which are high enough up the beach that they won’t get inundated and washed away so it took a little time to find the right turtle for the first logger but eventually I found a turtle just about to lay and I put the logger in for the first nest of the season! 

After deploying the logger I then measured her curved carapace length (CCL) and curved carapace width (CCW) as well as noted her scute pattern. When the turtle began covering her nest, we placed a stake around 20cm behind the egg chamber so we can find the nest when it is time to excavate. 

We then split into two groups, Toby went with Anna and I went with Abi and we managed to deploy all 5 loggers in one night, finishing around 1:30am. 

Tuesday 24th we were at North- East Bay from 8:30pm to 1:00am. This time we split Toby and Abi and Anna and I. The sand is a lot darker and it was a lot cloudier so it was a lot harder to see than compared to long beach, but the beach is a lot smaller so it made keeping track of each turtle a lot easier. We also managed to get all 5 loggers deployed in one night.

Wednesday – Pan Am 8:30pm – 1:00am – This time we split into Anna and Abi and Toby with me. Marcos also came with us as he had audio loggers he wanted to put into a nest to record sounds made by hatchlings upon hatching. The moon was really bright and there were so many turtles, but they were being very fickle, abandoning chambers a lot or nesting too close to sea. We thought at first we were going to be able to deploy all the loggers really quickly but it took until around 12:30pm. 

At one point Toby and I were surrounded by 8 turtles, we also saw two collisions where one turtle was digging and another came up and over into the same hole and bumped into another! One turtle even booted toby and I from turtle hole that we were resting in waiting for a turtle to lay!