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Costa Rica Sea Turtle Studies

STS11 Update - Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Helping the locals

Hola friends and family! Some of us who were on the 8-12 shift for night patrols stumbled our way out of bed at 5:15 to get ready to walk down both sides of the beach checking each nest and track marks from the night before. We got to the kitchen by 5:45 so we could grab coffee to wake us up, and a snack to bring with us because we were out there for three hours. Sadly no nests were hatching today, but it was nice to see the tracks during the day. Those of us who were on the 12-4 shift got to sleep in until 10:30 if they wanted, and when they woke up they made their way down to the kitchen where delicious home made breakfast was waiting for them. The people who were done the nest checking got to eat breakfast when they got back around 9 as well. <

Soon after that we had about an hour for a lecture given by Kirsty. During the lecture we learned about the life history of turtle, and everything we needed to know about nesting and reproduction. We also learned about the history of the awesome place we are currently residing at called Sea Turtle Conservation in Tortuguero. What I thought was really cool is that the female turtles have a hot body temperature, and males have a cooler body temperature. I found learning about the hatchlings most interesting because I adore baby turtles. We were also assigned our data synthesis paper after the lecture, and we all got to chose from multiple different topics. Then after our morning of hard work we ate a scrumptious lunch, and then had some free time until 1:30.

My favorite part of today was the community service that we did after lunch. WWe all got together in groups of 2, and one group of 3 and created posters. This weren’t just any regular posters, they were for the local children to hang up above their trash cans. We painted posters of the different types of trash cans they have so they can learn how to recycle. Some examples of the trash cans are: plastic, and we wrote a few sentences for them in Spanish that went along with the pictures we drew on there. We did the same thing for all of the other posters, they were just for different types of trash cans. After we worked on the posters for a few hours we got a little time to do our journal or our paper.

We then met in the cafeteria at 6:00 where we had dinner as if we were a little family. I announced my word of the day which was: hope. I picked hope because I thought we should all hope to see baby turtles in the morning. Then I told everyone my quote which was: “just breathe”. I picked that because it was basically telling everyone to take a second and breathe because I know everyone has been busy with work and pretty tired from turtle patrols. Also, I announced my goal which was to learn a new word in Spanish, and try to stay motivated because after these hard days of work are over we will have a relaxing time in drake bay.

After dinner some of us went to bed until our turtle shift, and others were getting ready to leave. On the turtle patrols all of us got to tag and measure at least one turtle that night which we were all super excited about. The day was very busy but great and I was happy to be doing community service for the local kids!

-Dana