I've Just Met Mary - she is a very special turtle!

Mary is a green turtle. A very special one.  In the 1970s Col, a distinguished turtle researcher in Queensland, constructed a research project to tag hatchlings at Heron Island and at another nesting site, so they could find out when they returned to nest. They tagged 250,000 hatchlings.  They only name them when they return to nest. Mary is one of 17 that have so far returned starting with the first last year.  Col is now in his 70s, a long time to wait for the results of your experiment.  But don’t worry turtles are still laying eggs into their 80s. 

Mary will be par of an research report in Nature or some such prestigious science journal.  As  I watched Mary lay her eggs – an effort that seems to engulf the whole body in a rhythm – I found out more about turtles.  Here are some interesting bits. They were around with the dinosaurs and have not changed much since. I am not sure what they evolved from. They live to a ripe old age and start breeding when they are 30ish. They like their food and in captivity they get fat really quickly and are fairly tame.  But no one seems to have taught them tricks.  But oh did we abuse them only a short time ago. Heron began as a turtle soup manufacturer and many turtles were killed to make soup.  Luckily that stopped and now it is a resort and a research station and I am here at a conference on complex systems. And they pay me to do this. But back to the turtles. We used to ride on their backs, put leashes on them, turn them on their back on the beach and watch. Torture and even thinking about it is.

The big technological break through in the research was moving from one notch to two.  Really. If you put one notch on the edge of a hatchlings shell you are not sure when it returns if it is one of yours.  This is because they get notched naturally a lot.  They also had trouble in where to place the tags on mature turtles flippers.  At the end they thought at first but then turtles can lose bits of their flipper.  So they moved further up and not, with titanium tags, they are pretty durable.

Oh, back to the two notch thingie.  Well they decided to put two notches on the hatchlings back and this makes them more identifiable.  But they did not know this for sure back in the 1970s.  But if you wait 30 years or so then you find out.  All is good and Mary is one of them. I will try to post a picture of her.

One last thing, they also put transmitters on the backs of turtles to track their movements.  They have to fiberglass them on.  But, here is the problem, when they dive down they cannot be tracked. Yet we can track aq satellite on the edge of our universe!  And this is the bit that galls.  Companies makc money out of charging researchers to track them.  You know telcos.  You would think they could usefully use Mary and her mates in their ads.  Look, even turtles use Telstra!  I can only dream.