Once again it is that time of year when we are saying “See you soon” to the turtles nesting in Tortuguero, with the hope that we will see them again in the future years.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has been involved in our project and with turtle conservation efforts in Tortuguero this year: Research Assistants; participants; students in the Junior Research Assistant Program; turtle spotters; guides; tourists and hotel owners.

We also want to thank the CCC staff from the San Jose office; the station managers; the boat captain Jorge; the cook Zelmira; the housekeepers Martha, Jeannette and Rebeca; the gardener Roberto and our security guards Wilfredo and Jose.

Thank you to Mawamba, Laguna and Pachira lodges for allowing us to use their swimming pools to relax from time to time.

Special thanks to the teachers from the local schools for allowing us to conduct environmental education activites with their students.

And finally, to the 81 adults and children of Tortuguero who accompanied us during night patrols.

November 2008 Tortuguero Newsletter
November 2008 Tortuguero Newsletter - Espanol

As usual, the second half of the green turtle nesting season means also having a new group of research assistants, coming from a variety of countries including Colombia, El Salvador, Panama, USA and England. Among this group was Eliseo, who also works at the CCC project in Playa Chiriquí (Panama), which is a very important nesting beach for leatherbacks and hawksbills.

During his stay in Tortuguero, Eliseo worked hard and learnt a lot about green turtles, as there are not so many in Chiriquí. This is a valuable experience for Eliseo that we hope he’ll take back with him to Panama. Good luck Eliseo!

In early September we received a group at the station who were participating in a workshop organized by the Inter-American Convention for the Protection and Conservation of Sea Turtles. The topic of the workshop was “Standardizing research methods on turtle nesting beaches”. We were also honoured by the visit of Dr. Archie Carr III and Jeff Phipps (family of some of the founders of CCC), members of the board and David Godfrey (CCC executive director).

Another piece of good news is that we reached our annual goal of a 1000 newly tagged green sea turtles on the 19th of September! To reach our target we had to carry out some extra 7-hour patrols beyond mile 5, our normal patrol limit.

October 2008 Tortuguero Newsletter
October 2008 Tortuguero Newsletter - Espanol

The CCC team has worked 866 hours of night patrol. We have encountered 738 green turtles, of which 428 turtles were tagged for the first time, 207 had been tagged in past years and 103 have renested this year.

The smallest green turtle encountered during this season measured 91cm, and the biggest 120cm in curved carapace length.

This year we have been visited by the oldest nesting turtle in the history of Tortuguero, with a history of 26 years coming to this beach to nest since the year she was first tagged (1982).

We have marked 76 Green turtles nest so far in the season and 5 Hawksbill nests.

The last encounter with a Leatherback was in the 14 of July.

Full August 2008 Tortuguero Newsletter

The CCC is currently patrolling with local kids from Tortuguero.

Thanks to this, the CCC is recruiting the kids who are interested in work with marine turtles.

The kids are learning to tell each of the nesting stages apart, reading tag numbers out, measuring the turtles, checking for any anomalies on the turtles and taking notes of the data in the field books.

The idea behind these patrols is to eventually create projects with marine turtles initiated by the same students of Barra de Tortuguero high school.

Our ideas for the future is to train the next research assistants amongst the local population enabling them to protect the turtles and representing their village.

The CCC´s team is still carrying out educational activities in the different schools in Tortuguero and San Francisco.

At the Colegio Barra de Tortuguero the students were introduced to a few basic principles of ecology, and soil contamination by banana and pineapple plantation byproducts was discussed with the youngsters.

On the other hand, the kids from San Francisco learned about the way in which the food web works, and how important each species is.

On July 26 this year, the new students of the Barra de Tortuguero high school, along with the CCC biological sta-tion´s coordinators at-tended the 7th Marine Turtle Student Sympo-sium in Guacimo, organ-ized by the Environment Project international (EPI).

The new students were very enthusiastic and learnt a lot from each lecture that took place in EARTH´s building (Escuela de Agricultura de le Region Tropical-Humeda).

The coordinator of the CCC field station gave a talk on the work that is carried out in the Tortu-guero project.

Several different sea turtle projects were presented in this symposium, which inspired the students from Tortuguero to perhaps create their own projects in the future.

The Green Turtle Program began the 9th of June.

The first group of Research Assistants came from a di-verse group of countries: Mexico, Spain, Columbia, Aus-tralia, the United States, France, India and Costa Rica.

Several of the Research Assistants arrived with previous experience working with sea turtles in their own countries as well as in Costa Rica. For example, Adhith Swamina-than worked with Ridley turtles in his home country, India, where the most important arribada (mass nesting) occurs with this species in the world.

Two of our Assistants are conducting studies examining the impact of tourist visitations on the sea turtles. We hope the results of these studies provide us with new in-formation and provide even more justification for the Spotter Program.

We hope that this will be a great year for the green sea turtles with the guides, spotters and CCC employees work-ing together to accomplish the same objective: the conser-vation of the green sea turtles.