Munching on jellies
Cass is just…not in a hurry. She’s left the nesting beaches of the Caribbean behind, so we are assuming she’s not nesting this year. But she still hasn’t gone very far. We remain unsure of why she chose to meander quite as much as she did over the past six weeks. It is not what we typically see female leatherbacks doing. This makes me imagine her as that kid in elementary school who was always a bit behind the group on field trips—looking up at the clouds beyond the buildings as we traipsed along the sidewalk or gazing a little longer at the museum exhibits than the rest of us.
There was a bit of excitement this morning that gives me an excuse to show you one of my all-time favourite leatherback video clips.
Mike at DFO is collaborating with NatureSeekers and Grande Riviere Nature Tour Guide Association on a leatherback inter-nesting movement study. On the years when female leatherbacks nest, they will lay many clutches of eggs (how many varies by turtle—roughly between 8 and 10) approximately 10 days apart. This study looks at what the leatherbacks do in the time between nesting events.
Kyle, from NatureSeekers, was working on this project on Tuesday night when they came across a CAN turtle (this means she had at least one flipper tag from our Canadian project, all of which start with the letters CAN). We had worked with this leatherback off northern Cape Breton in August 2014. This is the third sighting of this turtle; she had also been seen nesting in Grand Riviere in 2017.
“When we examined her back in 2014, she had fairly fresh rope entanglements on both of her shoulders,” said Mike. “She had clearly been recently released from gear.”
We didn’t satellite tag this turtle. (This means she wasn’t given a name.) Instead, she carried a temporary video tag as part of a study of leatherback foraging ecology that looked at questions like how and where leatherbacks find the jellyfish they eat, which are important to understand when you are trying to conserve a species.
There are few things more charming than watching a leatherback eat jellies. It is something of which I never tire. Kind of reminds me of Pac-Man. This video is shot from behind the turtle’s head, which you can see at the bottom of the frame. Check it out!