Tales from the Reef: May 2013

Yesterday morning I received a call earlier than usual. A turtle had been spotted on North beach…. I was out of bed and out the door in a flash but sadly not quick enough. By the time I arrived the turtle had disappeared into the sea. She left lots of tracks all over the beach though so it must have been a long night. Coming up the beach can be quite exhausting for her, a turtles flippers are ideal for the sea but not really for the land!! And after all her effort coming up the beach we didn’t find any nests…. We call this a "false crawl" - the female has attempted to nest but returns to the water without laying her eggs.

Not good for the turtle as it meant she would have to return to the beach again to lay another nest that she failed to lay before, but good for me as fingers crossed I might actually get to see a turtle nesting on the beach, a sight I have yet to see. However, there are 12 beaches at Reethi Rah and although turtles usually nest on the same beach, she could easily nest on another beach on the island especially when there are 12 to choose from, so it was best to check them all.

We started at 1230am first checking the beach were she made a false crawl the night before but no signs of a huge green turtle. We found tracks on the last beach we checked, Sunrise beach, but unlucky for us there were tracks coming out of the sea and tracks going back in. She had escaped us again…. we were gutted to say the least. Even worse we think we missed her by just half an hour!! The question is though… Did she leave a nest this time?? Yes she did :) Behind the villa in the bushes, Wade, my turtle nest finding expert, managed to find her nest. The turtle had made a huge mess so it was hard to locate it with all the sand everywhere. There were only 50 eggs in the nest so this would have been the last nest she laid for the season. Turtles generally lay 2 or 3 nests during a nesting season with the last nest having fewer eggs. We carefully took the eggs and have relocated them to another beach were they can be monitored more closely. We expect them to hatch within 50-60 days so more sleepless nights to come but it is so worth it...

Turtle tracks on north beach (false crawl)

Green turtle tracks close up

Nest found on Sunrise beach

Tracks on sunrise beach - coming up and going down

50 eggs (last nest from the female)

Relocating the eggs

50 - 60 days till the hatchlings emerge :)

I thought it was about time I blogged about the amazing Turtle Adventure trip that we do here… I even made a video

Reethi Rah is lucky enough to have a Hawksbill turtle feeding ground very close by known as “Turtle Reef”. It’s a beautiful site, amazing fish life and of course the turtles. Out of all the places I have snorkeled and dived over the Maldives this reef is truly unique. Not only can you guarantee seeing turtles in their natural habitat but you can really have some up close and personal encounters with these ancient marine reptiles. Most of the turtles are very relaxed, the shy ones will swim away but the ones that are not phased by people will sometimes swim along with you, or even come up for a breath of air right in front of you, a very cool sight to see.

The lifecycle of a turtle is pretty straight forward, when the hatchlings crawl out of the nest and first enter the water, they swim out to the open sea. They will spend the first couple of years out in the open ocean to avoid predators, and to basically eat and grow, and then when they reach dinner plate size they return inshore to a feeding ground. The turtle will spend most of its life at this feeding ground just leaving periodically to mate and nest.

Most reefs were you might happen to see a turtle, well generally the turtle will take one look at you and take off very quickly…. but not at Turtle Reef. As it’s a feeding ground and home to the majority of the turtles that we see, I think that they don’t feel threatened when they see people, and therefore they don’t swim away. They are nearly always eating, using their long beaks to probe into spaces between corals to find sponges and invertebrates to eat. Turtle Reef is covered in a green zooanthid, an invertebrate, which the turtles love to eat. When they are eating, they really don’t seem bothered by all the people looking down at them. Sometimes the turtles will look up at you, as if to say, “not these crazy people again”… and then just carry on eating!!

I do like to think I know some of these turtles personally now, I recognize the common ones I see and now many of them have names. Turtles have a unique scale pattern on each side of the head, kind of like a finger print so you can identify them, but I also recognise them by the patterns of encrusting coralline algae growing on their shells. All the turtles I see are photographed and uploaded into a photo identification database to try to establish their population size, foraging sites and migration patterns. So far I have identified over 60 different turtles from Turtle Reef and then about 25 different turtles from another reef called West Point.

The majority are female turtles, Spot, Ringo, Crush, Samha, Reina, to name a few of the regulars, then there are only 3 males that I have recorded, Marvin, Badhur and Ali. The males have a long tail which is how you can tell them apart from the females, well we all know it’s not really a tail!!! There are also lots of juveniles on the reef as well which is great, they are so cute, there is Junior, Kurumbas, Mona, Bear, Noah…. Generally every month I see one or two new turtles as well, sometimes they may stay a while or sometimes they are just passing by.

So out of the thousands of photos I have of these turtles, here are some of my favourite shots of the common turtles that I see, I wonder if they recognise me as much as I recognise all of them…