Punta Raton

Welcome to the beautiful Punta Raton! Apparently there is internet in the middle of nowhere. I am now working with PhD student, Noemi and living in this little community on the Pacific Coast of Honduras. It is about a three hour drive and then a half hour boat ride out here from Tegucigalpa.

We loaded all of our stuff into the bottom of Alex’s boat. Alex is a fisherman and our boat driver when we go out at night. That brings me to what we are doing here. Noemi has been here all summer and I’m hopping on to the projects for the last three weeks before we both head home. Down here we are working with Olive ridley sea turtles. These turtles are a little smaller than the Hawksbills I have been working with up until now. They also lay fewer eggs on average than Hawksbills. Their nesting season is almost over and nests are hatching everyday. There is a system down here where two different hatcheries pay people to bring them the turtle eggs, instead of selling them elsewhere.

What I’m working on with Noemi is hatchling tracking. She is studying the effect that the strong tides in this bay have on the hatchlings. We go out after the turning of the tide from coming in to going out and track the babies as they swim for eight hours. We attach a little boat to them with a string and the boat has a glowstick on it so we can track them at night. We are also going to be taking blood samples to do a genetic analysis of multiple paternity. Turtles can mate more than once, so hatchlings from one nest often have different fathers. The number of fathers for any particular nest can help us to estimate how many male turtles are out there, since they never come to shore. More fathers per nest means that there are more turtles out there.

Both of these hatchlings are Olive ridleys. Notice the size difference between them! Overall, the hatchlings are almost exactly the same size as the Hawksbill hatchlings, but the Olive ridleys have raised ridges down the back and a different shaped plastron (the lower shell, under the belly).