Spring has most definitely sprung and Australians are cowering behind jacarandas all over the country dodging the marauding magpies. I have just returned from my spring field surveys in the Lord Howe Island Marine Park where the usual greens and hawksbill turtles were seen cruising around the magnificent reefs. Sooty terns were nesting in the sand dunes and if you're lucky enough to spend the twilight hours by the water, shearwaters can be seen flying in like air force bombers, ducking and weaving through the palm trees into the burrows for the night.
Just add beer.
During the day, sunshine beams into the blue lagoon making visibility difficult to measure. I cut it off at 10+ metres most surveys because I don't have measuring tape long enough to give you the truth. The crystal clear water makes it easy to see right across the reef.
I'm hunting around these reef for turtles. While 95% of turtle researchers are bobbing around tropical waters, I'm suited up to discover what's going on at the southern extremes of turtle distributions on the east coast of Australia. Lord Howe Island is home to the world's southern-most barrier reef. Providing all the necessary requirements for turtle foraging habitat. It's even exposed to ocean currents that bring the turtles to the island. As a potential turtle foraging site, it's checking all the boxes. Which was already a given considering human records of turtles at the island that date back to 1788. However, there are inherent errors in human memories which prompt the need for methodical surveys, and there are also other reefs in temperate zones which have never been surveyed and have no records. If we know all the variables that make a habitat suitable, can we predict how many turtles are on reefs never before surveyed? Or koalas in forests never before surveyed? Maybe, just maybe there is a tool that could be developed to help with that.
