Once again I've been a tad remiss in this whole blogging thing. I'm sure my fans worldwide are crushed.

This past weekend I went to Playa Grande with my Marine Biology class. It was pretty sweet. It's a national park with no real town affiliated with it so it wasn't packed full of tourists. Actually, there were about 20 surfers and us. We went there because it's one of the few remaining beaches where the leatherback turtles still nest. It was right near the end of the nesting season and the scientists hadn't seen a turtle in like 4 days so we weren't overly optimistic about our chances. I guess we should have been. Just as we were all about to go to bed for lack of anything better to do (at 9:30) our professor told us that there was a turtle nesting and we should all get ready. We walked down to the beach, which was quite the hike and then hung a left and walked and walked and walked and walked and walked. Finally we hit the end of the beach. No turtle. So we turned around and walked and walked and walked and walked (in loose sand). Finally we stopped and Ana (the teach) listened to her walkie talkie and found out that we were supposed to take a freakin' bus to this thing. We had been walking for quite awhile so we figured we had to be pretty close but we had to hurry. So we wogged and we wogged and we wogged (wogging is the term Meghan and I came up with the extremely fast walking we were doing) and FINALLY reached the turtle. It was at the opposite end of the beach. Please keep in mind that this place is called Playa Grande. They weren't kidding about the grande thing. So we got to see the turtle but it was almost done so we couldn't get very close. We watched it make it's painstaking way down to the beach. Those flippers are not designed for land, let me tell you. I wanted to pick it up and carry it to the water. But then I realized it had me by about 1500 lbs (literally) so that probably wouldn't be a good idea. Or a feasible. After the turtle excitement we started to walk back to the cabinas. Before we got to far Ana told us there was another turtle. Yeah, that's right, more wogging. Thankfully this one wasn't that far away. We got to see it dig its hole (that took FOREVER) and lay her 67 eggs. It was really cool because we could get close enough to touch it. Those things are HUGE! This one was over 6 feet long. By then it was like 1:30 so a large majority of us were falling asleep on the beach.
The next day we wandered around, not doing much. That night we got to release some baby turtles. They're so tiny, you wonder how they even have a chance. Not that they have much of one, 1 in 1000 make it to adulthood. A couple of the 7 they released were really really dumb. Finally the volunteers had to just pick them up and put them in the water because it was clear that they were never going to make it on their own. Good, those slow, dumb turtles can live to breed more slow, dumb turtles. They have to release the baby turtles at the high tide line because otherwise they won't know to come back to that particular beach to nest. I'm not sure how that works exactly.
And now I'm sick of typing and have to start preparing for test 2 of 3. (The first one sucked big time. How am I supposed to know how the ocean morphology differs in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres? What is ocean morphology?)
- posted by Jaime @ 12:57 PM