Hatching A Plan

Researchers, Volunteers attracting leatherback turtles to St. Catherines

Although it’s not unusual to watch groups of loggerhead sea turtle hatchlings make their trek to

the Atlantic Ocean on St. Catherines Island, last summer’s nesting season was a little more unusual than most.

A pack of 29 leatherback turtle hatchlings headed out to sea, marking a historic moment at St. Catherines – the first leatherbacks documented to have successfully hatched on the barrier island.

The new group joins more than 100,000 loggerhead hatchlings released since 1991, thanks to the dedication of Gale Bishop, professor emeritus and founder of the Sea Turtle Project. He and groups of professors, students and other volunteers have dedicated years to field work, research and study to ensure that endangered sea turtles successfully hatch and hopefully return to nest again on St. Catherines.

During a routine beach canvass last June, student intern Lamar Mixson made the discovery of a lifetime when he found a twometer- wide crawlway on the island, which is twice as wide as a loggerhead crawlway. Realizing a leatherback had come ashore to deposit eggs, he contacted Bishop and the pair immediately began digging.

“After 45 minutes, we found an egg, the size of a dime,” said Bishop, about the first of 60 small eggs and 58 large eggs to be found.

To protect the precious leatherback eggs from tides and predators they carefully placed the eggs in a bucket of sand and moved them to a new location on the Islands’ North Beach. After

digging a new egg chamber 70 centimeters deep, the eggs were placed inside and covered with loose sand and a plastic screen to keep raccoons, feral hogs and other predators at bay.

The researchers patiently waited during the two-month incubation period.
“Because the integrity of the nest had been compromised by the ghost crab, we decided to extract the rest of the hatchlings and any unhatched eggs from the egg chamber,” said Bishop. Over the next three evenings, small groups of hatchlings were released into the ocean.“Well, 60 days came and went – no hatchlings,” said Bishop. On day 72, Mehmet Samiratedu, the manager of Georgia Southern’s University Store and a longtime volunteer, checked the nest on his pre-dawn sea turtle rounds. He immediately noticed a ghost crab burrow running downward into the nest. Bishop dug into the nest expecting to remove a ghost crab. Instead, he pulled out the Island’s first leatherback hatchling.

“It’s exciting to have the leatherbacks on the coast,” said Mark Dodd, the Sea Turtle Program Coordinator for the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. Leatherbacks are commonly found in the state of Florida, with more than 500 nests discovered each year. “Over the past three years, we have had only a handful of leatherback nests in Georgia,” he said.

According to Dodd, there were 11 leatherback nests located on Georgia’s coast this year. The fact that four of the nests hatched is a testament to the tremendous volunteer efforts on the barrier islands, he said. “One of the things people don’t realize is that these are remote areas. Field work is difficult and it takes a lot of effort to locate and protect the nests. St. Catherines is one of our important cooperators.”

Dodd works closely with the state’s barrier islands on all sea turtle conservation and recovery efforts, and said that monitoring also continues during the winter months when leatherbacks return to the area to feed on jellyfish, their favorite food.

In order to “tag” nesting sea turtles, Dodd said that each of the cooperators supplies an egg from each nest that is no longer viable to extract maternal DNA. University of Georgia researchers have developed unique satellite DNA markers to identify individual turtles, the specific locations where they nest, and how many times they return to the same location.

“Our hope is that the hatchlings will return to the same beach where they were hatched to establish a nesting population,” said Dodd.

It’s hard to imagine that these tiny, palmsized leatherback hatchlings may one day return to the Island as large as the size of a Volkswagen Beetle and weighing up to 2,000 pounds.

Like the return of sea turtles to St. Catherines, Bishop will faithfully arrive on the island this spring from his Iowa residence to once again protect the nests and shepherd another group of hatchlings out to sea, another group of K-12 teacherinterns along the beaches and new research by colleagues into the scientific literature.

Samiratedu is also eager for another challenge and new discoveries. His experience at St. Catherines began more than 21 years ago as a student intern, and he continues to spend three weeks each year on the island. “It’s a pleasure to go and work at a living laboratory, and these professors are my heroes,” he said.

—Mary Beth Spence