No, I Do Not Spend All My Time at the Beach (Just Most of It)

Week 6

Aside from a quick sentence or two at the beginning of the term, I haven't really talked much about my work here at Equilibrio Azul. Well, hold on to your hats, folks, 'cause that's about the change.

The harbor at Puerto Lopez

EA works on three main projects: turtles, birds, and sharks. Sharks is probably the least important of the three. Every morning volunteers go down to the harbor and record the number, type, and size of sharks and rays that the fishermen catch. It is illegal to fish for sharks in Ecuador, but it is legal to sell those that are caught by accident. The most common sharks we see are the pelagic thresher and a small species of hammerhead called the smooth hammerhead.

Rays

Although this work makes up only a very small part of what EA, it is very important to conservation as a whole. Sharks are long-lived and slow-maturing, and they produce relatively few offspring. In other words, their life history simply cannot support commercial harvest. Even high levels of bycatch may be too much for them. The data we gather can potentially give us an indication of how local shark populations are doing, and whether they require protection. At that point, government and national park officials can get to work.

This was a slow day

In practice... who knows? To my knowledge, little or nothing is done with the data we gather. Even if the government passes additional laws or Machalilla Park tries to put protections in place, there is little guarantee that they would be obeyed or enforced. Already, fishermen will “accidentally” come back with a boat full of sharks and only a handful of fish. This isn't common, thankfully, but if so little is being done, or can be done, to enforce the protections already in place, will more protections actually matter?

EA's bird project is one of the main reasons I chose this internship, but do to reasons outside of anyone's control, we're not working on that project right now. The bird work is done on the Isla de la Plata, also called “The poor man's Galapagos”, an island that is part of Machalilla National Park. Unfortunately, the park decided now would be a great time to make improvements to the facilities on the island. In the long run this will be good, because currently the building for the rangers and visiting volunteers (tourists are not allowed to stay overnight) is very primitive and has no fresh water. In the short run this horrible (for me, at least) because it means EA can't do any work on the island until they're done—which won't be for months.

A confused Magnificent Frigatebird

Work on the island in the past has largely consisted of censusing the bird populations: Blue-footed, Red-footed, and Nazca boobies, Tropical Birds, Magnificent Frigatebirds, and even a small population of albatrosses. I desperately wanted to see the albatrosses, but alas, is was not to be.

The most important work done here, by far, is the sea turtle project. There are five species of sea turtle in the Pacific, and we get two of them here: the Hawksbill and the Green. (Theoretically we get the Leatherback and Olive Ridley as well, but I've yet to see one and I don't think they're seen very often.)

Green Sea Turtle (photo from Wikipedia)

The Green turtle (Chelonia mydas) is largely herbivorous and favors lagoons and other shallow areas; the IUCN classifies it as endangered. We do less with the Green turtles than with the Hawksbills; mostly we go out in the harbor a couple times a week (water permitting) and “fish” for them by dangling a bit of fish in the water. When one comes close to the boat, someone dives overboard, grabs its carapace, and wrestles it on board. Then we measure it, tag it, and collect a DNA sample. This sounds easy, but catching the turtles is extremely difficult. I've seen close to eight turtles while out in the harbor, but only once have we actually caught one.

Hawksbill (photo from Wikipedia)

The Hawksbill, or Carey as it's called here (Eretmochelys imbricata) is in even worse shape than the green—it's classified as critically endangered. They favor tropical reefs and mainly eat sponges, along with cnidarians (jellyfish and relatives), including the infamous Portugeuse Man o' War. La Playita is an important nesting beach for the Carey, which is why we patrol it every night. When we find a turtle nesting we mark her nest, count the number of eggs she lays (the average is 140, but the other night I counted 199 in a nest!), then measure her, tag her, and take a DNA sample. The tags are metal clips we attach to their rear flippers, a little like very large and ugly earrings, but recently we've started to use PIT tags as well, since they are less likely to be lost. (PIT tags, for the non-scientists among you, are like the little chips you put in you dog or cat.)

Rachele the Sea Turtle (Photo by Felipe)

Occasionally we also put satellite transmitters on them. A few nights ago we attached a transmitter to a female we named Rachele (after our Assistant Director who is (sadly) leaving on Tuesday). This was a huge ordeal, as the turtle's shell had to be perfectly dry and, of course, it rains most nights here. We had previously constructed a very large wooden box and brought it to La Playita by boat. We had to put the box over the turtle keep her there until morning, watching all night to make sure she didn't escape or hurt herself. Then in the morning we had to wash her shell, sand it down, score it with a knife, and attach the transmitter with a truly amazing quantity of epoxy cement stuff. If you follow this link, you can see a map of Rachele the Turtle's travels.

Exhuming a nest (Photo by Rachele the Human)

We keep track of when nests have been laid and when they've hatched. A few days after hatching (so all the babies have a chance to make it to the surface) we do an exhumation, digging up the nest to count how many eggs hatched and how many didn't. For those that didn't, we open the unhatched egg and determine how developed the embryo was and how it died, if possible. This is not a lot of fun, since we usually do it in the middle of the afternoon and the failed eggs stink. But it's always great to find a few baby turtles who didn't make it to the surface and would probably have died without your help.

I won't say I absolutely love the work here, because some of it is rather boring or not much fun—like walking up and down Salango in the heat of the day with dozen of stinging sand flies chewing on you, or standing watch all night in the rain over a pissed-off turtle—but some of it is fun, and most of it is enjoyable, especially when you actually get to work with turtles. The babies are so cute, and the mothers are so magnificent. It's a real honor to have the chance to work this these animals, which are so amazing and of which there are so few left.