Today was definitely my lucky day, I was asked to sub for another turtle permittee volunteer on the West End of the Island and part of the duties involved doing a Green Turtle inventory - sweet!
The nest hatched a few days prior and the conditions looked good .... come and see....
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| As you can see the nest was equipped with a self-releasing mesh to protect it from Coyotes. |
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| After I removed the mesh, I softly removed the sand in the egg chamber - encountering roots and very damp sand in the bottom which was caused from the unusually high amount of rain that we've had this past week - 12"+ |
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| This turned out to be a smaller than average clutch - we counted 50 empty shells, 6 damaged eggs, 19 unhatched eggs and 1 live hatchling. |
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| The egg chamber went down a couple feet. |
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| We kept the hatchling in a bucket - I put a 6" ruler next to it for size comparison. |
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| Since Green Turtles are an Endangered Specie - the Florida Fish & Wildlife have documentation protocol - one of which is to take lots of photos - take a look.... |
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| Hopefully this little guy will be one of the lucky ones to make it to adulthood and will achieve a shell length of 3-4 ft, weight 250-400 lbs. Diet: sea grass and algae. |
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| Beside collecting several photographs for FWC, we also collected extra whole un-hatched non-viable green turtle eggs for the purpose of Stable Isotope Analysis. This evening, after dark, I will release this Green Turtle into the Gulf of Mexico and wish it well. |
Way cool! Good luck, little guy! France, you get to have all the fun!
ReplyDeleteI am loving this volunteer work and truly the best job in my life so far.
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