There has been marked increase in the establishment of sea turtle response
centres on the east coast of Australia in the past five years. Back then, when I
started as GM of a centre in Ballina, there were only five centres of our kind
across the country. Being the huge continent we are, and the tendency of sea
turtle work to be all-consuming, the managers, vet or volunteers at the centres
were not really connected. That was until the Sea Turtle Foundation and James
Cook University hosted the first sea turtle health and rehabilitation workshop
in Townsville in 2011 (and managed to make it affordable). So off I went back to my old college
town to represent our facility and share some pictures with other sea-turtley
people. I found the presentations fascinating. Sea turtle health and
rehabilitation issues are wide ranging and constantly under review. From
husbandry and quarantine, rescue response, nest monitoring, veterinary case
studies and round table discussions, around 100 people now gather for discussion and debate each year.
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| Image copyright ASR |
This year, the 3rd sea turtle health andrehabilitation workshop stretched over three days and included seminar sessions
on health, habitat and rehabilitation and field trips around the beautiful Townsville
region, including a morning on the stunningly beautiful Magnetic Island. The Magnetic Island Network for
Turtles (MINT) gave a short presentation and a guided tour detailing the early development of their
sea turtle rehabilitation centre blossoming out of an old local council pump
station in Horseshoe Bay (kudos to the Townsville City Council for the land). Already streets ahead of our first turtle rehabilitation
ponds back in the late ‘90s, the community support for MINT is reminiscent and undeniable. I bright future there, I see.
The
community here on the east coast of Australia (at least), expect that we should
invest time and effort into rescuing and rehabilitating all kinds of wildlife.
They may not be too fussed about the snakes and spiders, but sea turtles and
koalas definitely have a marketing edge and it is very rare that calls for help with infrastructure and construction of these community projects are not met swiftly.
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| Hawksbill turtle strandings in NSW 1998 - 2011* |
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| Seasonal variation of Hawksbill stranding events in NSW (1998 - 2011)* |
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| Latitudinal variation of Hawksbill stranding event in NSW (1998 - 2011)* |
Nowadays sea turtle triage and rehabilitation centres are
popping up all over the coastline in backyards of homes, businesses and zoos,
wherever the need has been identified. I suspect the increase in people willing
(or needing) to respond has been in response to what attendees at this year’s workshop
comfortably and repeatedly referred to as “The Starvation Stranding Event of
2011” (see figures above), which saw a marked increase in sick turtles both in real life and in the
media. Several of these centres are now sitting empty, and I strongly suspect
that the number of response centres will contract in the coming years now that
the stranding rates appear to be returning to ‘normal’.
Hart et al (2006) suggested
from drift bottled experiments that only 20% of turtles that die at sea reach
the shoreline. If I conservatively applied that theory to the stranding event I
witnessed in Northern New South Wales in 2011, this could suggest that around
350 Hawksbill turtles starved to death in that region, not just the 72 that we
saw wash up on the beach. It’s never been more imperative to go out into this
area to identify and assess sea turtle habitat in the Tweed-Moreton Bioregion.
*unpublished results
