Times of the Islands Winter 2020/21

green pages newsletter of the department of environment & coastal resources
Dr. Peter Richardson (center) works with South Caicos fishermen Gilbert Jennings and Dave Clare to tag and release a turtle for tracking.
Gilbert and Dave have fished TCI waters for decades, and taught the researchers everything they needed to know about catching turtles.
Attaching a tag to a turtle in the Turks & Caicos
Islands and then tracking it is no simple task—it takes
a lot of effort, time, patience, people, learning, money,
project partners’ support and skill, as well as a heap of
anxious hope when you finally release the turtle back
where it came from with thousands of dollars worth of
tech on its shell. Occasionally, when the tag malfunctions
soon after release, and you receive no data from the orbiting
satellites—all of that effort, time, money and worry
amounts to nothing— that is a gut wrenching feeling, we
can tell you. But it is far outweighed by the majority of
successful tags that have provided incredible insights
into the submarine behaviours of these ancient animals
that have outlasted the dinosaurs. Through live-tracking
turtles you can literally experience scientific discovery as
it happens—and that feels magical!
At the Marine Conservation Society (MCS) we have
been using satellite telemetry to study the lives of sea
turtles with our partners at the University of Exeter since
2005, when together we attached a tag to Malliouhana,
the huge leatherback turtle after she nested in Anguilla,
and who went on to migrate to Canada’s waters and back.
Since then we tracked adult female green turtles from
their nesting beach in Sri Lanka, and more recently we
have tracked green and hawksbill turtles in the Turks &
Caicos Islands as part of the TCI Turtle Project. This last
paper focused on the tracking of 16 sub-adult (or teenage)
green turtles captured while foraging in the North,
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