Night time beach patrol.

One of the most exciting things about working here at the turtle centre is the fact that we are on a Loggerhead nesting beach, and currently it is the nesting season. 
Iztuzu beach is protected and tourists are prohibited from going onto the beach at night. But as many of us are budding scientists and we are all here to protect the turtles we are privileged enough to have the entire 5km beach to ourselves after 8pm to study the female turtles and their behaviour.


Every night a group of us will head out at 10pm and walk along the beach until about 3am, we then sleep for a couple of hours and make the journey back along the beach at around half past 5, a tough, but rewarding job.
On the way along the beach we walk with the moon and stars to guide us looking for the tracks of the females heading up the beach. When the tracks are found we check for a nest (many females can be quite fussy and simply turn around and head back to sea without laying a nest), when a nest is found we move about half of the sand from the top of the nest and set up a cage to protect the eggs from predation from foxes and you wouldn't believe it but we also get badgers snacking on our turtle eggs!

If the nest is too close to the sea or between the sunbeds we will move it to a safe place, this can be done within the first 24 hours after the female has nested, but is more risky for the embryo development if left longer. 
The egg count within each nest ranges from 60-100 eggs on average with a few exceptions of 110/120!

The sex of the hatchlings of sea turtles is temperature dependent as they do not have any sex chromosomes, so to see what is going on in the nests under the sand we add temperature recorders that send data directly to our computers. If the egg is above 30 degrees the hatchling will be female, and at 28 degrees the hatchlings will be males. A serious risk for turtles is global climate change and the warming of the sand producing more females, and this could seriously affect the total number of mating pairs in years to come.

If we find a female making her nest or laying her eggs we will wait for her to finish, but we will usually take her measurements while she is laying as the females go into a sort of trance and are focused entirely on laying their eggs. All the females are tagged so we can see how often they are returning to nest and if they are behaving normally. One of our newest scientific projects is to also take genetic samples from the females we find and compare the DNA of the females hatchlings between each nest that she lays to see if she is mating with a different turtle between each nest in the season or if she is in fact storing the sperm and saving it for later. This will be a long term project that will take about 3 years of data to study.

Finally, we check the current nests for any predation and record the number off eggs that may have been eaten during the night. Foxes and badgers often roam the beach at night looking for a tasty snack. We arrive back at the centre just in time for breakfast and then head straight to bed!!

The past two weeks have been very busy here at the centre, with another new turtle, and lots of school groups visiting, sadly our newest turtle Samet was so badly injured that he did not survive, and even more unfortunate the young loggerhead Ferhat took a turn for the worse a few days ago and didn't make it. When you are with these turtles every day you start to learn their characteristics and personalities and they are all very different and beautiful, so it is always a very sad time to see them die, but in such extreme cases as Samet and Ferhat there was very little we could do to save them.
Mr no name however is doing well and has been named Anil. I hope that he will make a full recovery!

Tomorrow we head out on a boat to patrol Dalyan river, as we have had some calls about a rather odd turtle hanging around. More news soon! 




Total number of nests: 185.
Total number of mosquito bites: hardly any! it's a miracle!