Monday, June 26th - False Crawl #10 Green Sea Turtle

 Nice cool breezy morning  little trash and no animal tracks to be found.

Got a call from Jean saying Donna found something really weird. She then FaceTimed me to show this huge crater they found with an abandoned egg cavity. So I flew up there to discover a 7’11” body pit with abandoned egg cavity.

As soon as I saw it,  I didn’t think this was a loggerhead.  Then checking the crawl I found some differences in the crawls we usually find  No V, crawl measured 47” on outgoing crawl and about 42” ingoing.  Most of ingoing crawl wind blown away.  Third there were parallel flipper marks, and no comma shape.

In the next picture you can see how deep the abandoned egg cavity was.  It measured 16” deep and very wet down there.   May have been why she changed her mind.  We probed in and all around, but very hard sand.  

Below a

bucket was placed inside so you can see how deep the pit was.

Here are a few more pictures that were take by Jewel.

We left a pole to mark it, since we are leaving it up to SCDNR to determine if Green or a Leatherback.

Michelle left it up to us to make the decision basically because there is not a good picture of crawl going directly down the beach,  this is due to the wind blowing the dried incoming crawl away.  Being out there and seeing the crawl we do feel that the flipper marks were parallel.  Plus Greens can move large volumes of sand around and make a deep nest, which is what we found, so we have determined it was a Green. Before this, there was only one Green sea turtle who nested on Waties.

Text by Sharon

Waties Island performs research and management activities regarding sea turtle conservation in accordance under SCDNR Permit Number: MTP500.