Duck's Deductions: Sharks, Turtles, Manatees...

Time to blog about another adventure, but shockingly this one is NOT a month old. It actually happened last weekend. Shocking, right? Maybe at some point I'll actually blog about something the day after or *gasp* the day of an adventure, but let's not hold our breath. :)

Anyways, back to the adventure. Last weekend I drove down to Cape Canaveral to help with some turtle research that University of Central Florida was doing. It was a connection through work but an opportunity that we had to do during our weekend. A couple times a year UCF does data collection on sea turtle in Trident Basin at Cape Canaveral and this time we had the opportunity to help out. Basically what we were doing was capturing as many green sea turtles as possible using dip nets on two boats.

One of the two boats, and those are dip nets.

The boats slowly travel the edge of the basin looking for turtles along the rocks. If you spot a turtle you put the net as far down as possible in front of the turtle to capture it. Or if you are super into the experience, you leap off the boat with the net to capture the turtle (surprisingly that actually works and was fun to watch). There were are also a couple large nets that were in the water that had to be checked about every 20 minutes to see if any turtles got captured. Once captured, the turtles were taken back to the dock where they got work up. The work up included taking blood, tagging, skin samples, biopsies sample, etc. At the end of the day, the turtles were marked with a number on their backs (using non-toxic chalk paint) and released.

I had to work Saturday, so I was only able to help out on Sunday. Saturday there were 15 turtles captured, but sadly only 3 were captured Sunday. Partially because we were not re-capturing any of the turtles from the day before, which we saw plenty of. I personally did not capture a turtle, but it was a super fun time being out on a boat and doing some turtle watching.

Look ma...a sea turtle!!!!

This guy kept hanging out in shallow water by a wall, so he made an easy capture. :)

Got him (or her)!!!

Plus, I got to see a giant mantis shrimp, some nurse sharks, and a manatee!!!!!! That was actually my first time seeing a manatee so that was super AWESOME!!!