This coverage was achieved through a partnership between GRIS and thenNPR station in Atlanta.
In midnight of July, steam on the shore of the Iso Island, near Savana, Georgia, the volunteer Gabi Steinbach covered the depths of her arm in the sand to reach the nest of sea turtles with a registered head that appeared five days ago. I was removed from the remaining eggshell, sorting his volunteer colleague Sherry Petman and calculated from the moonlight and a red colored front lamp. Some parts are very small so that they cannot be calculated, but Pittman uses the largest pieces to determine the number of bubbles that made them this nest.
“Any egg peel more than 50 percent is considered a pear egg,” said Christine Zemetis, who brought out a team of volunteers in the Carreta research project. The team also investigated the unpopular eggs to obtain signs of development. “We will classify this in different stages to see the percentage of development in each egg.”
All this information tells the story of this nest, as the Carreta team has been following it for about two months since the turtle crawled on the beach, dug a hole with its fins, and laid these eggs. Whenever possible, these volunteer teams classify the mother who also nesting, taking measurements and recording its sign number if it has one.
It is an effort all night.
Wassaw Island data is part of a vast mosaic of information collected by volunteers along all 100 miles in Georgia, as well as the coasts of Florida, Carolinas and Virginia. They perform the beaches overnight or at dawn, stripping thousands of nasces of sea turtles every year. The volunteers collected data operations around the nest sites, the number of missions, the nest success rates, the mother’s details, and the more.
The data collection voltage in the 1960s began on a few Georgia checkpoints. This led to successful attempts in the late eighties and early 1990s to protect adults from marine turtles from window and nests of human intervention.
All this work allowed scientists to gain a deep view of the residents of the sea turtles over time, follow their long decline and renew the extraordinary expenses of the nests that were protected in the eighties and nineties and finally returned to the nest in the past decade. It also helps researchers, gunmen with new technology, monitor how turtles respond to the new threats posed by high seas and temperatures. But the long slow work – it is likely that many research today will not pay its fruits for decades.
Like many turtles, the gender of sea turtles depends on the head of Loggerhead on the temperature of its nests nursery – the warmer nursery that produces females. So with climate change progress, there can be more male females. Zimitis said the problem that will be exactly to the sea turtles is difficult to predict.
The cloning of marine turtles is a numbers game: turtles put a lot of eggs in many nests to increase the possibilities that some of their children survive the many threats stacked against them. Turtle mood in the ocean, then put the females from six to eight nests in one season, about two weeks away. Scientists know from the DNA test that females often mate with many males, but they can also store sperm so that they do not have to find a male to capture them every time they put a nest.
This means that the presence of fewer males of females will not necessarily prevent females from nesting – but it may harm the genetic diversity of turtles.
“The world of the environment will tell you,” Zimets said. ” “With a fewer males, this reduces the gathering of genes over the years. We do not know the effect it will be.”
To help track the effects, the Caretta Research Metholets project has been used inside the nests of sea turtles since about 2000.
It is also part of a wider effort to track the DNA of marine turtles. Brian Champlin, Georgia University researcher, has been leading this work since 2008, and his project now brings together DNA samples from turtle nests along the coast from North Florida to the borders of North Carolina Virginia. They know more about females because researchers can take samples from mothers while laying their eggs and from every nest, but Champlin and his team are now working to obtain more genetic information about male marine turtles so that they can better follow the changing population.
But sea turtles take about 30 years to reach sexual maturity. Hatsells, who crawls the ocean today until the 1950s. Although researchers cannot extract conclusions from their current data, it will be important after decisive decades from now.
“It is important to collect data now and we can look back for 30 years and say, well, this is the temperature they were hugging, and that is why we see this number of males,” Zimets said.
The same difficulty – having to move at the time of turtles – is chasing the research into the other main threat posed by climate change for marine turtles. The emerging sea erosion on the beaches that the turtle lives, and can ultimately make some historical beaches that are not used for turtles.
“If we are concerned about climate change, we are concerned about sea level rise,” Champlin explained. “How much oscillator we have here for these females to choose new beaches to colonize them?”
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This is a great axis in its work on the DNA of the turtle. Although the Wassaw team is running at night and can identify turtles while putting their nests, much of the data collection occurs elsewhere in the morning after the mothers’ departure. Shamblin uses DNA samples taken from each nest to match them with the turtles they have set.
Traditional wisdom has long maintained that turtles go back to the beach where they were measured to put their nests, but the reality is often less accurate. Shamblin and his team are used to match the DNA to follow the elasticity of turtles in the place where it nests.
To date, the answer is mixed. Some individual turtles stop at multiple beaches across different states in one season, while others are firmly committed to the same sand extension. Some of the strongest sincerity on the site – this means that the turtles themselves constantly live in the same place – on two islands in the Cape Roman National Wildlife Refuge, near Charleston, South Carolina. This is a cause of concern, Champlin said.
He said: “About 25 percent of all nests of turtles with a header northern Florida in these two islands.” “Therefore, it is a truly high -density nesting area. It also happens to be two of the most corrosive islands in South Carolina.”
But there is a reason for hope as well, because some turtles try many beaches, especially the younger who nests for the first time. This means that the population can gradually turn from the disappearance of the beaches as sea levels continue to rise. In Georgia, many beaches are less developed than in the neighboring states, and they are naturally shared in the sand with each other, so they can become a destination for marine turtles while other beaches fade – provided that the turtles are flexible.
Mark Dod, who leads the program for preserving marine turtles at the Ministry of Natural Resources in Georgia, said Georgia’s turtles for decades, said that scientists will not be confirmed for decades, making preservation of marine turtles different from other challenges.
He said: “We are used to working on a problem and fixing it within two or three years, and we feel satisfied with yourself, and move to the next thing.” “With sea turtles, this is a long -term commitment. It, as you know, may not be completely done during my entire career.”
Even without uncertainty in climate change, the spawning of sea turtles faces long difficulties to survive. After a long night in digging several successful nests, volunteers on Wassaw found one nest as no Hachnish – besieged due to the heavy rains that pressure the sand, is just one of the many natural risks they face.
But in another nest, they found Stragger – a lively lower sea turtle that did not go out with her colleagues. When the morning started at dawn over the ocean, Zemaitis put it on the sand.
She said: “We will give him a small space to extend his legs, stretch his fins, and run out on the big trip to the ocean.”
She used hatching, only one and a half inch, her fins in adolescents to pull her way slightly across the beach toward water. The first waves outperform the hatch while breaking it on the head. But in the end, for chants of volunteers and researchers, the turtles took to swim. If they survive predators and other risks in the widespread ocean, these sea turtles may have returned 30 years ago to reproduce – even if you find a coastal line that has been radically changed due to climate change.