If you have seen any sea turtles around the bottom half of Australia, please let me know by answering a few quick questions here... surveymonkey.com/r/Sea_Turtles_Southern_Australia. Survey open until July 2017!
Are you a snorkeller, diver, fisher or beach-walker, or do you play in the ocean on holidays? I'm searching for sea turtles all around the bottom half of Australia and maybe you've seen one. To date there has been very little field work done to survey sea turtles below their commonly accepted tropical habitat, but in NSW at least, turtles are regularly seen all along the coastline.
During this survey I hope to uncover these answers as I gather more and more evidence of resident sea turtles in sub-tropical waters and early results show them residing as far south as Jervis Bay at around 35 degrees S. Here, a local dive operator has been recording her sea turtle sightings for almost 17 years. This is very exciting news and complements the some 200+ sightings across the NSW coastline I have already gathered through field surveys and literature reviews. Contrary to commonly accepted distribution maps, hawksbill turtles have been recorded well further south than the southerly most range. Take the NOAA map below for example, most maps of hawksbill turtle distributions abruptly stop at the the NSW/Qld border, however records during this project place healthy resident hawksbills as far south as Lord Howe Island at 31 degrees S.
Why is this important? Turtles are a protected species under Australian law, and meet the requirements needed for further protection under other treaties such as the Migratory Species Act which serves to protect these animals across their life history, not just when they turn up in protected areas (which may be insufficient anyway given they were declared long before comprehensive seafloor data was available). All life history phases of a sea turtle have been recorded in NSW, with the exception of courting behaviour which has yet to be confirmed but has been reported often at some localities. Recent research suggests that Northern NSW beaches and their (already proven) suitable nesting habitat may be the saving grace of the many loggerhead turtles nesting at the massive Mon Repos colony in Queensland, many of which could become climate refugees. Considering that loggerhead turtles already nest in Northern NSW and pressures on nesting colonies to the north are only increasing, an increase in loggerhead nesting behaviour in that region seems likely in the future. But how will we know if there is an increase in nesting or foraging numbers of any species if we don't have a grasp on the current situation?
Green sea turtle foraging in the Cape Byron Marine Park.
As well as conducting multiple in-water field surveys across NSW and trawling the databases of nearby states for any and all records, harnessing the ongoing sightings of turtles by the general public will be highly valuable in determining how far south turtles are in fact happily living and which species are living there, Early results suggest that green and hawksbill turtles are often resident on inshore reefs as far south as Jervis Bay, with tracking studies suggesting that loggerhead turtles regularly feed in deeper waters of the NSW coastline between breeding seasons in Queensland.
Given this growing mountain of evidence, it is erroneous to suggest that sea turtles, particularly greens and hawksbills, are "tropical" species when both species are being recorded with regularity in sub-tropical waters. Time to re-write some of those text books perhaps and remind the state government of their legal responsibility to act to protect and conserve the species.
I read a post recently about a new course that was being proposed to post-graduate students, 'How to secure funding for your project'. It seems fundamental, something that should be taught in first year undergraduate studies. Alas, it does not exist. The paranoid part of me has decided this is a conspiracy to keep competition low. The other, more reasonable side of me, is livid with how undignified the entire science funding situation is in Australia right now, and I mean right now, because ten years ago things were different and we actually achieved things that weren't profit driven (hello CSIRO).
Last Monday night I was delighted to catch an episode of an Australian TV program called 'Q and A', a panel-style program where the audience can ask questions. This episode was unusual because it was devoid of politicians and was full of intelligent scientists, it was so refreshing and is worth a read or watch, During the episode, brilliant physicist Brian Green points out that you wouldn't have a mobile phone if an investment hadn't been made in quantum mechanic research back in the 1920's, and how hard it was at the time for those researchers to get funding for a science the general population was not interested in, Speed forward to today and I find myself in kind of the same situation, and the funding opportunities are depressing.
I'm not researching anything ground-breaking. My research will not result in a new device. My research will not make the government money. My research, in fact, is doing exactly what the government has said over the last twenty years needs to be done, but they won't fund it themselves. My research looks at threatened species, outside of their commonly accepted (and plainly wrong) distribution ranges. Which is the clincher for studying sea turtles. I'm not on the Great Barrier Reef. I'm not on oil and gas territory. I'm studying a threatened species in a state that doesn't even acknowledge that they exist here, I'm not going to pull votes for politicians, who seem to ignore everything that was ever written before they arrived anyway (see the Australian Federal Government's Recovery Plan for Marine Turtles, 2003).
It's no secret that the current Turnbull government is happy to continue carrying out its vendetta against anything that resembles environmental protection or conservation a la Abbott, gutting CSIRO, watering down the good outcomes of Greencorps, the Climate Council, the EDO, Carmichael, the list goes on, so there is little hope for change there until the next election. The Parliamentary Library estimates that research and development spending has been the lowest (0.56%) since records began in 1978 -79. Well done Australian Government, I've never been more embarrassed to be an Australian environmentalist, that's a first! Meanwhile, the defence budget is being pushed to 2%, because you know, we need more bombs and guns, or votes.
Happy new year one and all! The summer wildlife antics continue to be a pleasure to watch here in Australia. Plenty of snakes around with many reported bites and it looks like the parrots around my area have had a great spring with lots of youngsters getting around with mum and dad. I have seen some especially cute young galahs which have the most ear-piercing screech, you really have to feel for the parents having to listen to that all day.
The great white sharks that have been frightening the budgie smugglers off hyperphobic swimmers on the North Coast have followed the cold currents south (see pic below), much to everyone's relief. You can follow their movements via the DPI Fisheries North Coast Shark Tracking page here. The jury here is still out on acoustic trackers and abdominal insertions. Something about attaching noise-making things to marine creatures does not sit well with me.
It looks like I'll finally make it out to do some seas turtle surveys on the reefs around Cape Byron before the summer is out, hooray! The more I study sea turtles in temperate waters the more I want to know and share with everyone. While scrolling around sea turtle networks I keep reading the line "Sea turtles live in tropical waters...', but I'm here to tell you that's not entirely true. At least in New South Wales, which falls well below the Tropic of Capricorn, there are without a doubt foraging sea turtles on reefs above 20m. I hesitate to write "resident" or "a population of" because we're talking about a highly migratory suite of species that, if you were to define their 'residency' over a life time, resides across the entire South Pacific region. Protecting individuals is logistically and legally impossible over their life span, however protecting sites and corridors vital to their survival is not. It's not only possible, it's immediately necessary to protect these threatened species and in light of the quality of information that is now becoming available, it is time to review those protections and their boundaries. I will write extensively on protection boundaries in my thesis, but for now I want to bring your attention to the quality of information.
There is huge potential value in obtaining video footage of my turtles surveys on reefs in NSW, particularly if I ever manage to get to the remote Middleton and Elizabeth Reefs. The video survey methods include baited cameras and transect surveys and both methods would provide me with presence or absence of sea turtle species data. In the process of researching these methods my chief advisor sent me a GoPro Hero4 Session (which comes with me on my next survey) so I set about familiarising myself with the potential use of it when I came across the heart-stopping, eye-widening capabilities of the 360 spherical rig and stitching software and the results. If you haven't yet had the pleasure, viewing a 360 video on your mobile device practically puts the camera in your hands. You can turn around to look behind you, look up, look down, view any direction. It's just amazing and it's also really accessible to everyone.
The first 360 video I experienced was using the Facebook app on my iphone to view a surfing video produced in Tahiti. I was in the barrel! But the part that grabbed my attention was in the first few moments, when the camera goes below the water to view the reef and I realised just how many researchers would be able to gather data from it.
GoPro Spherical: Tahiti Surf VR
Anthony Walsh and Matahi Drollet bring us inside some of the biggest barrels Tahiti has to offer in full 360°.For the most immersive experience, click and drag on your desktop, or move your iOS device in any direction.
Posted by GoPro on Thursday, 12 November 2015
More digging and I came to the XL Catlin sea survey project which blew my mind. They get around the oceans surveying different locations (see pic below) and provide the video online, which you can view as quadrats or video, it's also very versatile.
Then I discovered that Mythbusters (a popular American television program) had been employing the technology to do some experiments with shark deterrents (below) which are not only fascinating but the footage of the sharks swimming around you is just mesmerising (on a desktop computer you can still move around in the video using the navigation buttons that appear in the top left corner of the video frame, otherwise use the youtube app for free gyroscopic rotation).
I can't wait to use this video capture technique soon to show you more wonders of our marine world. In the meantime, you may like to skip over the acidic rant below on the lack of funding for postgraduates in Australia.
Unfortunately finding collaborators and sponsors to source cameras, rig and software is proving difficult. Naturally Mythbusters aren't coming to help but I can't even raise interest from the Australian Institute of Marine Science who already have the rig and are closely affiliated with my university, which has been disheartening. An extended series of emails with Kolor, the subsidiary of GoPro on the topic ended with "let us put you in touch with a trainer in Australia". Unless that trainer comes with cameras and a rig for me that's not very useful. What a struggle it seems to be to undertake what the Australian federal government suggested should be done a decade ago but the state governments have failed to deliver on, threatened species monitoring. Why does each government ignore the last? There appears to be lots of grants available, but most of them are green-wash smokescreens that would barely cover the basic costs of getting in the water, let alone filming the place for the benefit of all. Also for the amount of time and effort you put into lodging the applications for pocket-change funding by squeezing your project into their narrow-minded guidelines, including repeatedly annoying your network for references, you can imagine that after a few 'we're not interested in sea turtles in NSW despite it being repeatedly identified as a high priority and data deficient area' replies that in the end you just stop applying. If I proposed training turtles to find all I'd be drowning in money. Insomuch as I'm now booking my attendance to the annual International Sea Turtle Symposium, I also feel the need here to point out that the majority of these grants will not help you get to the international conference on your topic either. Most of them, in fact, specifically rule out that option in their eligibility criteria 'will not fund conference attendance'. Despite the fact that the conference you have been invited to present at is very rarely held in Australia and is one of the very few opportunities to meet and greet colleagues who work in your field across the world, the costs of travelling from this our remote island to engage our peers are apparently not worth the investment, or a paltry $500 is offered by greying power-mongers who think that you'll still get a great deal if you 21 day advance purchase your flight with Ansett. Thanks, not sure what I'll tell the pilot when I'm a third the way over there unless the Australian dollars really swings. So this month it's either buy your own gopro spherical rig or accept an invitation to present at the conference. I'm not sure if I've made the right decision, but I'll be reporting from Peru soon.
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