The 2019 season is slowly coming to an end. However, we are still seeing nesting activities and the monitoring of the beaches still continues. We check all the beaches 3 times a week. It hasn’t been the best season. So far we registered a little over 30 nests.
The turtle rescues are also a regular activity for our staff. Mostly Ard Vreugdenhil is the one to go out and help injured turtles. We so far had 2 incidents with loggerheads, otherwise it is mostly green turtles that are in distress.
This season we had 4 interns assisting us. 2 of them already finished their internship and returned back home. The 7th of November all of them gave a presentation for interested volunteers about their work.
Amber, Isa and Nicky focussed on sea turtle population research. They collect and order data about resident sea turtles and they use pictures of the turtles to identify the individual turtles.
Eva focussed on education. We set up a specifically designed education program in collaboration with Green Phenix and FBTT travel. 3000 kids got a presentation about sea turtles and the threat of plastic pollution. We also incentivised the kids to collect plastic bottles and this worked better than expected, because kids collected a total of 30573 plastic bottles, that will be locally recycled, which prevents the plastic from ending up in the ocean.