Here I am! I slipped off the radar there for a bit, evidently,
since my last blog was so long ago that I needed to send out a forensic team to
locate and carbon-date my password. In the midst of the leaf litter piling up
into a fire hazard around my desk I have found myself back on track on a day I
can signpost as ‘the first day of the rest of my life’. Why so important? Well,
there’s the story.
A few days after my last blog back in late 2011 (which I really do need to write a follow-up for), while I was managing a marine turtle
rehabilitation centre on the far north coast of New South Wales Australia, my
curiosity about these animals was propelled into a new dimension. On an average
year the Australian Seabird Rescue North Coast Branch (don't let the name confuse you) responds to around 50 or so turtle strandings along the
250km of coastline they patrol. However, in November 2011 I observed a
massive and sudden increase in the stranding rates of one particular species,
Eretmochelys imbricata, commonly known as the Hawksbill turtle. Internationally regarded as
critically endangered, this is one of those species that we humans nearly wiped
off the planet to jewel our lives with their beautiful shell in our ignorance of
population dynamics and sustainable harvesting. It wasn't just the number of
individuals that ‘crash landed’ in my region that was alarming, but the fact
that they were all the same age and starving to death sent up more red flags
than lifesavers during a big swell and I wanted answers.
.JPG) |
| Lance Ferris (1946-2007), Her Excellency Professor Marie Bashir Governor of NSW, the Honorable Don Page MP and a Hawksbill Turtle at the opening of Australian Seabird Rescue's first marine turtle rehabilitation centre in Ballina circa 1996. Photo APN. |
Being the not-for-profit, mostly volunteer-run operation
that we were, responding to this sudden increase from five Hawksbills in a year to transporting up to seven every day was a big shock to the system for everyone involved. Capacity
to house the turtles was limited, policies were reconsidered,
veterinarians advice was sought. members were begged to help and many conference calls ensued. It soon
became apparent that there was no other turtle rehabilitation centre in the
country observing anything similar. It didn't take long before our team started
looking and feeling war-weary, fatigued and distraught. Of the 72 Hawksbill
turtles that stranded in two months, 69 of them heartbreakingly died within 24 hours. In terms
of being a rehabilitator trying to make a difference for each individual, there
was not a thing we could do about it. There were tears. We froze as many carcasses as we could in
the hope that somewhere down the track we could do some tests and get some
answers, and that’s when the reality of the bills started to set in.
There is no shortage of tests you can do on a dead animal,
or its habitat for that matter, to determine the cause of death. It would be
interesting to see how much money would get poured into a study of 72 dolphins
that washed up dying, but that is a matter for another blog. Suffice to say
that paying around $750 per sample to test for pollutants was prohibitive for our charity, and
when I say per sample I don’t mean per individual. Ideally you want a piece of
every major organ and some muscle tissue to get tested as well so we’re talking
around eight to ten samples per animal which makes the term ‘prohibitive’ a bit of an
understatement. Some months after the 'turtle tsunami' we invited all of our marine wildlife veterinary
friends to come to the facility and spend a day looking at the carcasses and discuss their ideas. That doesn't sound as inspiring as it really was.
Meanwhile, in a town far, far, away, I was delivering a
conference presentation on the topic to a group of turtle health experts in the
hopes we could collectively figure out the root cause. Much debate followed
around trays of canapés and beer when one researcher approached me and said “You
know you have enough information there for a PhD.” My first reaction was as if someone had just offered me the chance to clean someone else's toilet. No one I have ever spoken to with a PhD has ever said to me "...and I can't wait to do it again!". Nevertheless, the lure of making a timeless contribution to the conservation of our oceans won me over and I began to rearrange my life to accommodate the mission. I don’t think he was
expecting me to nail him down as my academic or research supervisor as a result of that statement but somehow along the way Dr Hamann and James Cook University generously found room to squeeze me into a research program and this brings me to today, the official start date of my Master
of Philosophy (Science) by research degree.
Sadly, I may never be able to give
you a definitive answer as to why all of those teenage Hawksbill turtles starved
to death in this location at that time. It is apparent that during the year
that followed Cyclone Yasi, and a series of other extreme weather events that occurred in short period of time, seagrass
beds on the east coast were decimated by wave action, turbidity and pollutants
and the subsequent deficiency in food resources resulted in an increase in stranding rates of marine turtles and dugongs right across the coastline. However, Hawksbill turtles are not big fans of
seagrass and compared to turtle species that are there is a general paucity of information on the Hawksbill life history in Australian waters.
What I need to do is start with what I know and what I have and go and have a look at the habitat for
Hawksbill turtles in my region to see what is going on. Where is it? How much
of it is there? What condition is it in? Are turtles likely to increase in this
temperate region as a result of climate change? Just like following a lion or a bird to observe its habitat,
I need to follow some turtles. Right, so I need some turtles, a boat, an
underwater camera or three and some satellite telemetry gear. That last sentence
right there has an immeasurable educational value, but a financial value of over $100,000, easy. I balked at writing $200,000
but it wouldn't surprise me if it does top that and if you factor in the capital investment being made into customizing a research vessel then the whole thing blows out like a souffle. Then there’s the paperwork for
research and ethics approvals. You can’t just go gluing stuff onto animals
willy-nilly you know, and at around AUD$5,000 per tracking device you really don’t
want those buggers falling off too soon.
Next week I’ll introduce you to Demi, a beautiful adult
Hawksbill turtle who is likely to be my first victim... er... I mean research
subject. Oh, and I promise to give you a juicy update on the oil spill blog where a NSW MP calls me a 'senseless amateur' in a parliamentary debate he then lost.
Happy wildlife watching!
