[Music]
hi I’m a turtle hugger I love sea
turtles and so do many people around the
world and because of that we’ve turned
them around from the brink of extinction
in just one to two generations I’m also
a self-confessed
and slightly proud of it a turtle geek
and I’ve been researching them for 25
years and I’m going to give you some
glimpses into the things that we found
out focusing on the green turtle so this
is le le as a green turtle who was born
and ascension on the 12th of May 1969
means she’s 48 years old just like me
she’s called le because that’s my
daughter’s name and she’ll hate that
I’ve done this Ellie emerged with her
brothers and sisters from a nest on
Ascension Island all those years ago but
mostly sisters because the gender of sea
turtles is determined by the temperature
at which that they are incubated and the
vast majority of hatchlings are females
so I’ll just leave you with the thought
of what will be the impact of climate
change-related global warming on sea
turtles if the babies are already 90
percent female and the temperatures
rising the hatchlings dig their way out
they find the sea by going to the
brightest horizon and then all together
they make a run for it and they head for
the open ocean trying to swamp any
predators that are waiting for them on
the beach or in the near shore waters at
that point in time however Ellie is now
all alone she heads out into the open
ocean and for three to five years she’s
away out there hiding in the open
because predators are more concentrated
by the coast it’s harder to find her in
the open ocean so she’s out there at the
behest of ocean currents eating small
planktonic organisms
and after three to five years she moves
into seagrass meadow and because Ellie
was born in Ascension Island that could
have been on the coast of Africa or in
the coast of Brazil
she then perhaps moves on to an algal
bed definitely in Brazil are or Uruguay
where she feeds on algae and perhaps
seagrass and it’s the greenness of the
food that taints the color of the fat
and that’s why green turtles are called
green turtles not because they’re green
on the outside they’re green on the
inside like many of you I hope she eats
her greens and then during this coastal
phase and also in the pelagic phase this
is a period where these young naive
turtles are exposed to ever-increasing
buttons of plastic which look like food
and this is 155 pieces of plastic that
was taken out from one juvenile turtle
in the Mediterranean and this is a
problem where they tell you good news in
this talk as well but this is something
that we should all be concerned about
the impact of plastic also this side
picture is a turtle’s eye bathed in
crude oil this is a victim of the
Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of
Mexico and again other forms of
pollution if we don’t get handle of them
are going to degrade our marine habitats
and a marine biodiversity and impact our
health so we do need to look at these
things too but in this foraging these
series of foraging areas for about 20
years
Elli grows up to a point in time where
she starts to feel like it’s time to
move on to the next stage and that’s
when the hungry swim begins because she
swims all the way from Brazil to
Ascension Island essentially islands in
the middle of the Atlantic halfway
between Brazil and Africa it’s maybe a
swim of 2000 2500 kilometers takes her
over six weeks and she doesn’t eat from
when she leaves the foraging area when
she gets to the breeding area the meals
are already there waiting and so those
mating males are actually smaller than
females and sea turtles so that there
are jail and they trying to compete each
other for her attentions and she’ll
often mate with more than one male and
then she’ll Spain somewhere too high
don’t for a month while she produces her
fertilized eggs after that month she’ll
start coming up the beach to complete
the cycle and she may be coming up on
the exact same beach and to which she
was born but certainly to the same area
where she was born she will lay at
probably three but usually at least five
clutches of eggs at two-week intervals
120 ping-pong shaped eggs about a metre
and deep and then she’ll cover her
tracks to try and hide the nest from
predators so if we just think then she’s
once she’s finished that clutches she
heads back to Brazil six weeks coming
across the Atlantic meeting a month
waiting ten weeks of producing eggs and
laying eggs and digging holes and
covering over six weeks back across the
Atlantic six months not with a bite to
eat she lives off her fat and perhaps
not surprisingly green turtles don’t
breed every year they take a couple of
sabbatical years in between and try and
feed up before they do again but this
lifecycle avoiding predators running
across the oceans has been extremely
extremely successful these animals have
been around since before the dinosaurs
it’s a really successful life history
trait and these animals have persisted
in large numbers at some points in time
as Europeans colonized the temp the
tropical world these animals were in an
abundance and what harvested ruthlessly
they were there they came every year
they could be kept alive on boats was
fresh meat for a long time and so many
populations were extirpated within an
inch of extinction but with a
conservation ethos developing and the
20th century
lots of conservation started to happen
and many populations are starting to
recover this truckload of turtles was
recovered in North Carolina last winter
there was a cold snap and sometimes in
the northern part of the range they just
get too cold and just wash up on the
beach but these green turtles are
existing in numbers higher than ever
recorded in historical times in North
Carolina because
of the conservation that’s going on in
Florida and Mexico because these are
animals that live without international
boundaries and they move across ocean
basins also on the nesting beaches many
populations are starting to increase
that our threats however we’re still
concerned about fisheries bycatch
accidental capture and fisheries and
because that allows fish around the
world more fishing happens to catch them
which means there’s more chance of
catching turtles and they can be caught
in long lines and trowels and gill nets
and so what we really need to do is know
where the turtles are living where the
fishy area is that act and look at where
the hotspots of interaction are so we
can mitigate this is a younger me 25
years ago tagging a turtle in Cypress
that same turtle is still coming up to
breed every couple of years
she’s probably also like me 48 years old
we can tag them but it takes an awful
lot of time before you start to build up
the information of the movements and
you’re dependent on people reporting it
and you don’t know what they did between
one flipper tag tagging and its
recapture you don’t know what the turtle
did in between so with the advent of
satellite telemetry we’re able to look
at this big ocean from space and we can
know that our tagged animal is from the
moment we release it on the beach till
the moment she turns up in the foraging
area and so this is an alias population
this is in Cyprus this this is a
satellite climate transmitter and so it
just basically pings up to space the
satellite tells us where she is like a
GPS we can download it and create maps
of where she is so we tagged 30 turtles
in Cyprus in Cyprus and Turkey Israel
and Syria and you can see in the map
behind the redder the areas the more
turtles that pass through so we can
start to create corridors of where these
animals move on migration also the black
dots with the numbers and those are
foraging areas and you can see that it’s
different numbers of turtles are in
different areas but the discreet areas
and so now we can zoom in on those two
areas in Libya and see what can be done
to preserve half of the population of
each
Mediterranean green turtles some of our
tags also have really cool dive
computers onboard and so we can start to
get insights into what they do where
they are and so if we just look at the
top graph here time goes along the
x-axis along the top so we’ve seen a 24
hours in the day of a turtle and in the
summer in the top graph you can see
she’s diving to about 25 meters for
about half an hour up for a breath back
down foraging away still pretty good for
breath-hold diving half an hour whilst
active all day all through the night
however in the winter when it gets cold
the seagrass has stopped to grow in her
foraging area and she does considerably
less she sets on the bottom 6 hours as a
breath bike down sits on the bottom as a
breath 6 hours what did you do today I
breathed four times
so this animal isn’t hibernating but to
all intents and purposes she is she’s
sitting out the winter until she can
start to feed on the spring flush and
then hopefully go back and breed some
more so hopefully I’ve started to give
turn you into total geeks and maybe some
of you will be even slightly more turtle
Hagerty than you were to start this talk
part about Ellie she was born in 1969
she moved to Brazil in 1974 and about
1994 she started migrating to ascension
and breeding every two to three years
its October now the breeding season
begins in November so right now she’s in
the middle of the Atlantic swimming to
Ascension
starting to feel a bit peckish but she’s
on her way home thank you very much
[Applause]
hi I’m a turtle hugger I love sea
turtles and so do many people around the
world and because of that we’ve turned
them around from the brink of extinction
in just one to two generations I’m also
a self-confessed
and slightly proud of it a turtle geek
and I’ve been researching them for 25
years and I’m going to give you some
glimpses into the things that we found
out focusing on the green turtle so this
is le le as a green turtle who was born
and ascension on the 12th of May 1969
means she’s 48 years old just like me
she’s called le because that’s my
daughter’s name and she’ll hate that
I’ve done this Ellie emerged with her
brothers and sisters from a nest on
Ascension Island all those years ago but
mostly sisters because the gender of sea
turtles is determined by the temperature
at which that they are incubated and the
vast majority of hatchlings are females
so I’ll just leave you with the thought
of what will be the impact of climate
change-related global warming on sea
turtles if the babies are already 90
percent female and the temperatures
rising the hatchlings dig their way out
they find the sea by going to the
brightest horizon and then all together
they make a run for it and they head for
the open ocean trying to swamp any
predators that are waiting for them on
the beach or in the near shore waters at
that point in time however Ellie is now
all alone she heads out into the open
ocean and for three to five years she’s
away out there hiding in the open
because predators are more concentrated
by the coast it’s harder to find her in
the open ocean so she’s out there at the
behest of ocean currents eating small
planktonic organisms
and after three to five years she moves
into seagrass meadow and because Ellie
was born in Ascension Island that could
have been on the coast of Africa or in
the coast of Brazil
she then perhaps moves on to an algal
bed definitely in Brazil are or Uruguay
where she feeds on algae and perhaps
seagrass and it’s the greenness of the
food that taints the color of the fat
and that’s why green turtles are called
green turtles not because they’re green
on the outside they’re green on the
inside like many of you I hope she eats
her greens and then during this coastal
phase and also in the pelagic phase this
is a period where these young naive
turtles are exposed to ever-increasing
buttons of plastic which look like food
and this is 155 pieces of plastic that
was taken out from one juvenile turtle
in the Mediterranean and this is a
problem where they tell you good news in
this talk as well but this is something
that we should all be concerned about
the impact of plastic also this side
picture is a turtle’s eye bathed in
crude oil this is a victim of the
Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of
Mexico and again other forms of
pollution if we don’t get handle of them
are going to degrade our marine habitats
and a marine biodiversity and impact our
health so we do need to look at these
things too but in this foraging these
series of foraging areas for about 20
years
Elli grows up to a point in time where
she starts to feel like it’s time to
move on to the next stage and that’s
when the hungry swim begins because she
swims all the way from Brazil to
Ascension Island essentially islands in
the middle of the Atlantic halfway
between Brazil and Africa it’s maybe a
swim of 2000 2500 kilometers takes her
over six weeks and she doesn’t eat from
when she leaves the foraging area when
she gets to the breeding area the meals
are already there waiting and so those
mating males are actually smaller than
females and sea turtles so that there
are jail and they trying to compete each
other for her attentions and she’ll
often mate with more than one male and
then she’ll Spain somewhere too high
don’t for a month while she produces her
fertilized eggs after that month she’ll
start coming up the beach to complete
the cycle and she may be coming up on
the exact same beach and to which she
was born but certainly to the same area
where she was born she will lay at
probably three but usually at least five
clutches of eggs at two-week intervals
120 ping-pong shaped eggs about a metre
and deep and then she’ll cover her
tracks to try and hide the nest from
predators so if we just think then she’s
once she’s finished that clutches she
heads back to Brazil six weeks coming
across the Atlantic meeting a month
waiting ten weeks of producing eggs and
laying eggs and digging holes and
covering over six weeks back across the
Atlantic six months not with a bite to
eat she lives off her fat and perhaps
not surprisingly green turtles don’t
breed every year they take a couple of
sabbatical years in between and try and
feed up before they do again but this
lifecycle avoiding predators running
across the oceans has been extremely
extremely successful these animals have
been around since before the dinosaurs
it’s a really successful life history
trait and these animals have persisted
in large numbers at some points in time
as Europeans colonized the temp the
tropical world these animals were in an
abundance and what harvested ruthlessly
they were there they came every year
they could be kept alive on boats was
fresh meat for a long time and so many
populations were extirpated within an
inch of extinction but with a
conservation ethos developing and the
20th century
lots of conservation started to happen
and many populations are starting to
recover this truckload of turtles was
recovered in North Carolina last winter
there was a cold snap and sometimes in
the northern part of the range they just
get too cold and just wash up on the
beach but these green turtles are
existing in numbers higher than ever
recorded in historical times in North
Carolina because
of the conservation that’s going on in
Florida and Mexico because these are
animals that live without international
boundaries and they move across ocean
basins also on the nesting beaches many
populations are starting to increase
that our threats however we’re still
concerned about fisheries bycatch
accidental capture and fisheries and
because that allows fish around the
world more fishing happens to catch them
which means there’s more chance of
catching turtles and they can be caught
in long lines and trowels and gill nets
and so what we really need to do is know
where the turtles are living where the
fishy area is that act and look at where
the hotspots of interaction are so we
can mitigate this is a younger me 25
years ago tagging a turtle in Cypress
that same turtle is still coming up to
breed every couple of years
she’s probably also like me 48 years old
we can tag them but it takes an awful
lot of time before you start to build up
the information of the movements and
you’re dependent on people reporting it
and you don’t know what they did between
one flipper tag tagging and its
recapture you don’t know what the turtle
did in between so with the advent of
satellite telemetry we’re able to look
at this big ocean from space and we can
know that our tagged animal is from the
moment we release it on the beach till
the moment she turns up in the foraging
area and so this is an alias population
this is in Cyprus this this is a
satellite climate transmitter and so it
just basically pings up to space the
satellite tells us where she is like a
GPS we can download it and create maps
of where she is so we tagged 30 turtles
in Cyprus in Cyprus and Turkey Israel
and Syria and you can see in the map
behind the redder the areas the more
turtles that pass through so we can
start to create corridors of where these
animals move on migration also the black
dots with the numbers and those are
foraging areas and you can see that it’s
different numbers of turtles are in
different areas but the discreet areas
and so now we can zoom in on those two
areas in Libya and see what can be done
to preserve half of the population of
each
Mediterranean green turtles some of our
tags also have really cool dive
computers onboard and so we can start to
get insights into what they do where
they are and so if we just look at the
top graph here time goes along the
x-axis along the top so we’ve seen a 24
hours in the day of a turtle and in the
summer in the top graph you can see
she’s diving to about 25 meters for
about half an hour up for a breath back
down foraging away still pretty good for
breath-hold diving half an hour whilst
active all day all through the night
however in the winter when it gets cold
the seagrass has stopped to grow in her
foraging area and she does considerably
less she sets on the bottom 6 hours as a
breath bike down sits on the bottom as a
breath 6 hours what did you do today I
breathed four times
so this animal isn’t hibernating but to
all intents and purposes she is she’s
sitting out the winter until she can
start to feed on the spring flush and
then hopefully go back and breed some
more so hopefully I’ve started to give
turn you into total geeks and maybe some
of you will be even slightly more turtle
Hagerty than you were to start this talk
part about Ellie she was born in 1969
she moved to Brazil in 1974 and about
1994 she started migrating to ascension
and breeding every two to three years
its October now the breeding season
begins in November so right now she’s in
the middle of the Atlantic swimming to
Ascension
starting to feel a bit peckish but she’s
on her way home thank you very much
[Applause]
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