Ologies with Alie Ward - Cheloniology (SEA TURTLES) Encore with Camryn Allen

Episode Date: August 2, 2022

Hope you dug tortoises because we’re back, shellin’ out the good stuff, with this week’s encore of sea turtles, so get ready to become wildly obsessed with them. Cheloniologist Dr. Camryn Allen met up with Alie on a tropical island (ok, in a hotel room on a tropical island) to chat about flipper slappings, turtle rodeos, nesting BBs, current surfing, endangered statuses, field work, sleeping under water, world records, boopable noses, male:female ratios, mind-boggling navigation, what you can do to help them, and the many mysteries that still remain. Take a deep dive into the world of seartles. Or is it surtles?Follow Dr. Camryn Allen on TwitterThis week's donation was made to Hawaii Marine Animal ResponseMore episode sources and linksSponsors of OlogiesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, masks, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Steven Ray Morris and Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam MediaTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Oh, hey, 2022 me here, again, introducing you to another really, really good Encore episode, Sea Turtles. What do we call them? You're going to find out. Thank you again for everyone who has sent wonderful messages. I'm going through some stuff with my family, my beloved dad, your grandpa did pass away on July 8th. For more on that, you can start listening to the secrets around mid-April.

The toothology Encore, I think I talk about being in a hospital parking lot. But so it's been a little bit of a journey and I'm taking some time that I've needed to take off for a bit while I'm making some new episodes also that you're going to love in a couple of weeks. Those will be out. So, new episode, new secret at the end, just in case you want it. Okay. Oh, hey, it's that lady on the plane next to you who gently punched you in the neck while

taking off her parka, Allie Ward, back with another episode of Allergies. So if you're here for turtles and you're jumping right in with the sea turtles, do just back the hell up and listen to the Testudonology episode first. Okay, listen, I know you like sea turtles. We all do. But we cover a ton of really basic turtle ground in that and some sea turtle happenings and it's going to give you just a great turtle base. Now if you don't yet call sea turtle turtles, you've got to go back, listen to last week's

first and then just rejoin us. I promise we will be here when you get back. You just have so many facts about turtle dongs to get informed about first. Okay, onward and downward into the sea. But first, before Cirtle Fest, 5,000, a little business. So thank you to all the patrons at patreon.com slash allergies who keep the podcast going and who weather all of my behind the scenes updates and videos and they submit questions. A dollar gets you in that club because as always, my heart is a bargain.

And thank you to everyone who has told a friend or four or tweeted about the show or left a rating or subscribed. First of all, left a review, which are such nice notes and I creepily read you a fresh one each week like this one from Joey Bethe who says, my greatest dream in life has become to run into Ali maybe in an airport and I'll be all, oh, hey, it's your awkward cousin that your parents never told you about. Until that day comes, I will continue to listen to Ali talk to really interesting people about topics that I didn't know were so fascinating.

P.S. Joey Bethe, if you ever see me in an airport or anyone, just feel free to say hi. You'll know it's me if my hair looks like a squirrel's nest. Okay, cologneology. So if you listened to Testudonology from last week, first off, congrats. Testudonology comes from the Latin Testudo for tortoise and cologne in Greek means turtle. So as an etymology opportunist, I decided to divide them thusly because I think it makes more sense. Testudonology focuses on tortoises and this one, sea turtles, boom.

Okay, so you love them, you worry about them, you have them tattooed on your body perhaps. When I googled sea turtle tattoo, 25 million search returns, tortoise tattoo, 10 million and honestly some of those tortoise returns look like tattoos of sea turtles. So I know where your heart lies. Now I was headed to Hawaii on a business trip and hell yes, I tacked on a few extra days just to drink from a coconut and get so many bug bites that I went to urgent care. But before I left for Hawaii, I contacted NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and I just started cold calling people in the Honolulu Turtles Department.

I got so many voicemails and finally I got a human on the line and I breathlessly begged to interview someone about sea turtles and I was hooked up with an amazingly charming and dryly hilarious coloniologist who came to my hotel room hours before I left to fly home and let me barrage her with absolutely idiotic questions. What a sport. With black rimmed glasses and shoulder length curly hair and a winning smile, she's the kind of person who's probably just constantly asked to be in everyone's bridal parties because she's just cool and fun.

She seems like she has her shit together like that, you know? So she's a research scientist who studies hormones of animals and she got her PhD studying koalas in Queensland before dipping into the wonderful world of sea turtles. So she looks at the sex ratios, the breeding rates and the endangered and threatened statuses of the green sea turtle. She also side note has the best laugh of anyone I've ever encountered. It's just like sonic sunshine. So get ready to hear about why sea turtles are so cute and how far they'll swim to make

babies, getting flipper smacked, mind boggling migration patterns, nest building, some thoughts on finding Nemo, doing field work on tiny islands and more about turtle genies and hell mouths with coloniologist Dr. Cameron Allen. So you are a turtle worker. Do I call you a turtle biologist? Yeah, biologists is probably a good thing. And so how long have you been working with turtles since 2011? So seven years now.

Do you feel like that's enough time to really get acquainted with turtles or do you feel like you could get to know turtles until your old age? I think until I'm old. Definitely. It'll probably be retirement when I'm finally like, I really understand turtles now. How do you feel about turtles before you worked with them? Were you ambivalent or were you stoked about turtles? I think turtles hold a special place in most people's hearts when you see a turtle in

the wild. They're kind of just fascinating because they're living dinosaurs, really, but I just thought they were cool. As soon as I started to work with them, though, different story, you become just fascinated by them and really want to learn as much as you can. So do you become a turtle nerd? Oh, 100%. I have a t-shirt that says turtle nerd on it.

Do you really? For sure. Called it. I feel like we should just pause this interview, we'll revisit it another time. I'll go home and change my clothes. But what is it about turtles that your heart gets won? Something about their faces. Their faces are all just very charismatic, even though they are reptiles, there's something

about them. When you look at them, that's so prehistoric, but yet charming. I guess they look like everyone's kind of cranky grandpa. Yes, they could. Everyone's got an old uncle that looks like a turtle, bald, maybe a little frowny. Maybe up this one. They eat. You know what I mean?

Yeah. They look like an old guy. They're relatable. Mm-hmm. Somebody in your life is like a turtle. Boop de boop de boop, the way you remain in the ocean. And so now your journey into turtle nerddom, where did that start? Only in a community college, I was taking a class to learn how to make maps of just locations

of animals, and a woman sitting next to me in the class worked at NOAA, and I told her I wanted to get back into wildlife conservation, and she said, oh, I've got two people, one that works on cetaceans, marine mammals and dolphins and those things, and another guy that works on turtles. So Cameron contacted both of them and ended up working for both of them. What was your first foray into turtlehood like? Were they like, come, come into our den, come be a turtle person? Randomly, my first week of work was at the Sea Turtle Conference, which happens every

year. So I was just immersed in turtle knowledge from all of the experts around the world for a whole entire week. It was overwhelming, but super exciting. That's like a gathering of the juggalos, but for turtle people. How exciting, you know? Yeah. It was pretty epic.

Okay. So my first question, walk me through the anatomy of a turtle, because here we have an animal that has a car on its back. We have an animal that's made partly out of a suitcase. What's happening with it? FYI, if you listen to student analogy, we got into more depth about the shell structure of turtles in general, and how shells are pretty much like a dome of fused vertebrae, and how, no, they can't just ditch them and find another shell, any more than how our

brains can't crawl out of our own skulls into a new one. So that horrific imagery aside, I'm sorry, let's move on as Cameron gets specific as hell about turtle business. Yeah. So they have a hard shell, so the top of it's called carapace, and then the bottom part is called a plastron. So then you have the flippers, so the front and hind flippers, which poke out both. So sea turtles can pull their necks back, but not into the shell.

So all of their appendages are poking outside of the shell. But a land turtle, sometimes you can get full clearance, and you're like, look at that rock over there. Yep. And it's like a booyah, I'm a turtle. Yeah, so sea turtles can't retract any of their appendages back inside, so they're susceptible to shark attack because of that. Oh my God, I guess I hadn't thought those big fin flippers can't go anywhere.

No. So that was the trade-off evolutionarily. It's like, we're going to give you flippers, you're going to be a water turtle, but you're a little vulnerable. Mm-hmm. Oh. Side note, when I say we're going to give you a flipper, I mean, millions of years of evolution and natural selection and lucky mutations that allowed our weirder friends

to survive, not like a deity tankering in a backyard shed, hot glue gunning flippers. PS, when did all of this ding-dang evolution go down? So turtles evolved from land turtles, which we learned last week have shelled ancestors up to 260 million years old, and sea turtles branched off and adapted to live at sea around 150 million years ago. So this means 66 or so million years ago, they survived the asteroid impact that latered the dinosaurs. In fact, turtles and crocodiles are the only tetrapods over like 55 pounds that survived

that mega bummer. So from an evolutionary standpoint, they are tough as shit. What is the lifespan of a sea turtle? Because this is a question that I got the most on Patreon. So in captivity, there have been turtles since the 50s or 60s that are still alive. So pretty old turtles. I don't know if we know the actual age of turtles in the wild because it's actually difficult to age a turtle.

They don't have teeth that grind down or anything. The best way we can do it is if a turtle dies, you can collect their humerus bone and their flippers in the front, and you can cross section it and they have growth rings like trees do. No. And you can use those growth rings to try to age the turtles. So that's our best way of trying to figure out their ages. So I can't exactly answer your question, but they are really old, and they don't resection

maturity until they're about 25, so you can kind of get an idea of how old they would end up being if they aren't starting to reproduce until 25. Oh my God. So they don't go through puberty until they're mid-20s. Yep. So at 25, sea turtles may just be going through awkward boner stages, but they can legally buy beer in rent a car. So then maybe their life spans might be double Rs?

I think potentially they have some threats that they need to overcome in order to make it to that age, but I think if there's nothing else in the world that would try to eat them or kill them, then sure, I don't foresee why they couldn't be 150 years old. Secret of youth is just to be born looking old, you know, in a good grandpa. Yeah, you're born like either Benjamin Buttons. Totally. And I should circle back, okay, a little bit more about your history, your history with biology.

Where did it start? In reality, growing up, because we lived on like a little mini farm, so I was always surrounded by animals, so I loved playing with them and learning about them. But it wasn't until my undergrad, my last year of college, where I studied abroad in Australia, fell in love with koalas, and then also I did an independent research project on song sparrows. So just dabbling in little facets of research that related to wildlife. And then how did you wind up in turtles and what do you do with turtles?

So my background is in endocrinology, so I'm a big fan of hormones, in other words. Love them. Yeah, can't live without them. I should note that Cameron is wearing a silver geometric necklace that looked like the molecular structure of something. And after their interview, I asked, is that like caffeine or sugar or dopamine? And dopamine, it's not. It's the shape of a testosterone molecule.

So as a biologist who studies the endocrine system of various animals, this was definitely adorably on brand. Also buckle up for more turtle sex talk. So I use my skills looking at endocrinology to figure out the sex of sea turtles. So sea turtles, sex, you can't figure it out externally until they reach that sexual maturity because then the males will grow longer tails. Oh, yeah. So if you're looking at two very adult sized turtles, so big turtles, side by side, you

can tell them apart. So female will have a short tail and the male will have a long tail. But if you have two immature turtles next to each other, their tails are going to be the same size or similar, depending on whatever sex they are. So it's not easy to figure out the sex of the little immature turtles. So we use hormones to figure out the sex with male turtles having higher testosterone and female turtles having lower testosterone. Because I'm sorry, you're going to have to walk me through how they get it on because

you can't just flip it over and be like, where's your dick? Like it's in there? Oh, yeah. It's up in there. So they have a cloaca, like birds, so it's one hole for all things. One hole to rule them all. So the males have a longer tail, which allows them so they mount on top of the female. So his plastron softens when he's reproductively active so he can sort of go around her a bit

better. And then the tail comes down and then they meet cloaca to cloaca, but his penis will come out of the cloaca and go into her cloaca. Got it. So he needs the tail to be like FYI. I'm a dude. I'm coming in. Yeah.

Okay. So she's like, who's that girl? Oh, look at that tail. Okay. Okay. Got it. And now, so hormonally, how, or I should really ask, from like a field work perspective, how hard is it to get a blood sample on a turtle?

So similar to humans, they have a jugular vein in their neck, which we call it the dorsal cervical sinus, which is a mouthful, but in reality, it's easiest if you can get the turtle inverted slightly so that the blood rushes to that neck region. And then with training, you can actually get the sample pretty quickly, but you use similar to if you went to the doctor and you got some blood drawn for a test, they would insert a needle and then use one of those vacutainer tubes, which has a vacuum in it, so it sucks the blood into the tube. So we can do that same similarly with turtles.

You collect the blood from the vein in the neck. Do they get a lollipop or anything? Um, no, they get to go back in the water though. They're like, bye. Yeah. Bye. Thanks for nothing. And so what is your, your research like and what is your work like?

Do you spend a certain number of months in the field and then some in the office crunching the data? What is it like to be a turtle biologist? Most often for sea turtle biologists, we do get to spend several weeks in the field doing sea turtle research, and then the majority of our time is spent in the office crunching the numbers, um, doing outreach, responding to public data requests. So my current field research here in Hawaii, I get to go to the Mariana Islands twice a year.

Okay. During the interview, I was like, oh yeah, the Mariana Islands, truth be told, I would lose $1 million in front of all of America if I had to point these out on a map on a game show. So I just looked it up and the Mariana Islands are a string of 15 volcano tops way, way the hell in the Pacific Ocean, west of Hawaii by like a lot of ocean and a bit east of the Philippines. They're part of Micronesia and they include Guam, which is a US territory.

Now there's some World War II history that is just generally not a feel good story involving heavy civilian casualties and the islands getting captured and recaptured between the US and Japan as just a gorgeous, serene, tropical setting from which they could launch missiles at each other. As a palette cleanser, I just Google image searched Mariana Islands and they are disturbingly achingly pretty. Okay, onward. So Cameron goes to science there.

Our research focuses on the Pacific Island region. So that includes American Samoa, the Marianas, and then the Pacific Island regional area. So it could be Hawaii and the Prius. So I guess going to Mariana's twice a year and catch turtles with the local collaborators there. It's really fun. Do people ever think that you just got into the turtle business because of the islands? I don't think so because I actually didn't move here until two years ago.

I'm originally from San Diego. Do we have sea turtles in San Diego? We sure do. We do? Yes. Walk me through where do we find the turtles? Where are these sea turtles? Okay, so they're in South Bay.

I met in the world, but she started specifically with San Diego. So write this down in case you ever go to San Diego. Do you know where the old power plant used to be? No. Okay, so in the southern portion of the bay, there used to be a power plant there. The turtles were there before the power plant, but they like to hang out in the warm water effluent that the power plant pumped out. So they'd sit in the turtle jacuzzi and just hang out and bumble around.

But now that the power plant's gone, the turtles are still there in that region. There's a lot of seagrass pastures down there. So the turtles that forage in San Diego Bay come from Mexico. So they're all migrating up from Mexico and hanging out in San Diego Bay until they're sexually mature and then they'll go back down to Mexico, mate, nest, come back up again. West coast, but that's coast, man. So what regions of the world do we find sea turtles? They're circumglobal.

You can find them all over the place. Often they're in the tropics, right? Turtles like to be in warmer water, but you have turtles, example, the leatherback, which they live in Indonesia, but they go all the way across the Pacific to Monterey Bay area to forage on the jellyfish there. So the waters are much cooler there, and then they're also crossing the Pacific, which can be cooler waters. How do they make it that far?

They're good swimmers. They're just, they got some powerful pectoral fins. Do they do they sleep in the water on the way? Like do they bob in the water? Do they sleep underwater? When are these dudes catching some z's? Yeah, they'll sleep. I am not the expert on the sea turtle sleeping, but they definitely will sleep along the way.

If there's reef nearby, they'll kind of nudge themselves underneath a coral reef edge and just kind of hunker down and sleep. But the leatherbacks, there's not too much for them to sleep under. So I'm assuming that they're just having a snooze at the surface for a bit. Okay, I looked into this and quick reminder that turtles, despite being water dwelling, can't breathe underwater, but they can hold their breath for up to seven hours if they're just chilling, maybe catching some z's. Seven hours, by the way, is 24 times longer than daredevil bad boy and human magician

David Blaine can hold his breath. David Blaine in the Southern New World Record. Sea turtles are like, oh, 17 minutes and four seconds. Then you had to breathe in pure oxygen from a tank right before you had to do it live on Oprah for 17 minutes. That's cute. It's cute. No, it's cute.

How are they breathing? So similar to us, they breathe air. They don't have gills, so sea turtles need to come up. And then most of the time, you'll see them open their mouths and just gasp like, and then they'll go back down again. They do have a nose, but I always see them open their mouths, so I'm assuming that their mouth breathers. Oh, interesting.

What cuties. What's an encounter with a sea turtle that you've had that was like, maybe memorable or maybe it was awful or magical? The most memorable was last year I got to go to American Samoa to Rose Atoll, which is a national park, so not everybody gets to go there. And it's the biggest green sea turtle I've ever seen in my life. She was 114 centimeters, curved carapace length, I can't tell you what that is in inches. I'll put it aside.

A big fucking turtle. So for my fellow Americans who are metrically challenged like me, that's 44.8 inches or almost four feet long. Now how big was the biggest turtle ever? During the time of the dinos, there was one species, I just looked this up, seven meters long, 21 feet. Just okay, for a second, stop what you're doing, just take a minute to picture a sea turtle as long as a motor home.

Just stare out the train window or look up from doing the dishes and just picture an alive yacht with an overturned bowl for a spine just cruising the sea. All right, come back. Okay, so nowadays, the largest sea turtles are leatherbacks in the Atlantic and they're two meters long or about the length of your actual dad. But the biggest leatherback ever found is now preserved in a Welsh museum in Cardiff after washing ashore in the 1980s, having drowned, it was tangled in a fishing line. But this behemoth was nine feet long and over 2,000 pounds, which is several feet taller

than under the giant and quadruple his weight. So RIP that turtle. So RIP under the giant, who I just found out right now was French. How did I not know he was French? Anyway, back to the biggest sea turtle Cameron's ever encountered, which again, 44.8 inches long. So she comes hauling up the beach and her hind flippers are probably as big as my head, if not bigger, she's just ginormous.

Anyways, this was the first turtle that they have resided at that location and she came back three years after the first time they saw her. And the first time they put a satellite tag on her and she went to Fiji. So she obviously likes to graze at Fiji and get fat and then comes back to Rose Atoll to lay her eggs. What a life. I know. I wonder how old she is.

I want to go to Fiji. I know. I don't know. That turtle's got to be really old. She was she was special. And just her the the largeness of her hind flippers digging her nest. I wish you guys could show a video of this. It's incredible how they use their flippers like hands.

All right. Okay. So, you know, I got you. So I watched a video and oh my God. Okay. So I thought their back flippers would be like canoe oars and just kind of like stiffly flinging sand around, but hell no, they can grasp dirt like hands. It's less of a paddle and more like a fleshy webby pair of oven mitts attached to your

butt. Astonishing. Also, the eggs look like coated ping pong balls. Anyway, hind flippers. They were just enormous, but she was so delicate in the creation of her nest for her eggs. Do you guys get to name these turtles or do you have to call her by like a number so that you don't fall in love with her? We can name them.

We often let our local partners name the turtles if we're catching turtles with our collaborators. I don't think she has a name, but I would have called her big mama or something. I don't know. She was huge. Large Marge. Gosh, I love that she's just probably out there right now. Like the size of a Volkswagen Beetle or whatever just cruising. And now you are a reproductive specialist with them.

Do they still have babies at a hundred years old? I don't know why not. If they can reach that age, they can reproduce. So for example, they've been studying the sea turtles in the Hawaiian population since the early 1970s. Some of the turtles that they tagged back in the seventies and eighties continue to be resided at that same location every year. So there have been turtles that they've cited for over 40 years now, and they must have

at least been around 20 years old when they first saw her. Of course, we don't know that for sure. So there's turtles at least 60 years old still pumping it out. So I don't know why they couldn't be a hundred still. Still making babies. Making babies. It is kind of a numbers game though, right? I mean, how many eggs do they lay in a clutch every year?

Each species is different. But if we keep talking about green turtles, because that tends to be my focus, they're about a hundred eggs per clutch. And how many will survive into adults? I think the saying goes it's about one in a hundred. Yeah. Yeah. So one out of every clutch.

And a female can lay on average five clutches a season, maybe up to eight. So she could be producing four to maybe eight viable offspring a year. Imagine finding out that you have 99 siblings, but they're all dead. And then finding out those were just 99 out of 800 dead siblings that year. And maybe I'll be ever in your favor. And that's pretty good. That's pretty good. I mean, it's more than I can make.

Yeah. What can I say? I mean, you could make eight, but oh, so expensive. Oh, God. And yeah, also this mark, the stretch marks, I'm just cruising a salad bar in Fiji being like, I got to feed these babies. I'm going to make. Yeah.

And so, you know, I always feel like we see these videos of these little sea turtles, they're making their way out to the beach. But even just like footprints in the sand can trip them up. Is that true? Or can they get over that? They can get over that for sure. It might trip them up and make them more susceptible to like a predator coming to swoop them.

But yeah, they can get up and flip back over and overcome big rocks on their way. Yeah. OK, good. They might get stuck for a bit, but they'll figure it out. Do you ever in your work get to just sit and watch them run into the ocean? Yeah, I got to do it this past summer. What is that like? It's like a race. I don't know.

I just sit there and cheer them on. I'm like, go, little turtle, go make it. You're looking to do it. It's fun just to watch them just stampede down the down the sand beach and get into the ocean. And how are sea turtles doing these days? I feel like they're a friend who's like going through a rough time that we have to check in on.

So some sea turtle populations are doing fairly well, for example, the eastern Pacific green sea turtle population, the ones that nest in Mexico, they're doing pretty good, increasing trend. The leatherbacks and the hawksbills are the ones that we're more concerned about. They're they're having big issues with losing nesting habitat, collection of eggs and and actual animals for meat, as well as bycatch and fisheries. So we are we are pretty concerned about the leatherbacks and the hawksbills. Just because we haven't really listed them, here's a rundown of the seven

species of sea turtles. You ready? OK, there's the green, the loggerhead, Kemp's Ridley, all of Ridley, hawksbill, flatback and leatherback. And their statuses range from threatened to critically endangered, depending on the region. Now, sadly, in winter, turrets can be found bobbing in the east coast waters, stunned or killed by these really sudden temperature drops.

Now, this is where things get a little tear jerky. So there's an organization of people with general aviation pilots licenses who have been volunteering their time and their planes and their fuel to fly these chilly little certs down the coast to warmer places like Georgia and Florida so they can just thaw out like big leathery snowbirds. So what is the name of this organization? Turtles fly to dot org. OK, so why do these species who have been around for 100 million years

not know to get the fuck out of dodge before winter hits? How do they not know that? Well, I mean, climate change can't be real if they're getting colds done, right? Yeah, no, researchers think that because of climate change, the bays are staying warmer longer so the turtles don't know it's time to migrate until it's too late and a cold snap comes, which came up talking to Cameron. How we do it on the global warming front and the turtles,

do they love it because they like a jacuzzi or they like every other animal on the planet? This sucks. What are we doing? I think up to a certain temperature, the turtles probably like the warm water. But in terms of their livelihoods, sea turtle sex is determined by the temperature at which the egg incubates. So warmer temperatures produce female turtles. Right. Well, yeah. So right now we're we're seeing what seems to be an increase

in the number of female turtles being produced, likely because of these warming temperatures producing more little female hatchlings. Beep beep, lady party. So my my main question is how many males are enough? Because we keep seeing at all the foraging grounds that we're looking at a female bias. So are these females finding males that they can mate with? And we don't know. And so why do you think from an evolutionary standpoint

that that tends to happen, that warmer temperatures will incubate female eggs? I get asked this question a lot and I don't have a good answer for you. There's there's been a lot of people looking into the evolutionary benefits of this, but I don't think there's ever been like a really good answer. And so what percentage are we talking or are lady baby turtles? So we've looked at a couple of populations in the Pacific. So San Diego Bay, being one of them, it was almost three females to one male, which isn't a big deal.

Hawaii, it's about the same. Guam and Saipan were right around two to two point five females to one male. And then a study that we just did in Australia was very similar, where it was about three to four females to one male. What was interesting for that study is we combined our hormone data with our genetics data to figure out which nesting beaches the males and the females were born on. And interestingly, the male turtles in our foraging

ground were only coming from the southern Great Barrier Reef population. And we found that almost no male turtles were being produced in the northern Great Barrier Reef population. It's insane because that's one of the largest green sea turtle populations in the world. So once these, you know, immature female turtles in 20 years, when they come back to that nesting beach, are there going to be males for them to mate with? Oh my God. Yeah. So what do you do?

Do you have to intervene and toss in a couple of dudes? Is that even possible? It's possible. So there are managers who will make those decisions on what interventions they want to do. In Australia, they are focusing on increasing the shade over the nest, wetting the nest to keep them cooler. They are doing a couple of different things to try to produce more male turtles. Oh my God. Yeah.

So from a feminist perspective, the future female. I mean, that's not a good thing when it comes to turtles, though, right? One male can go quite a ways, though. So the males mate more frequently than the females. So Cameron says they think that the females on average nest every three years or so, but they have seen males coming back yearly. So males can mate with multiple females. So what I'm saying is that it's a lady buffet for horny man turtles.

One male can can do quite a bit. OK, so there's maybe just less competition. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder if that means we're going to see, like, bust or turtle babies, because it's like, well, your dad sucked, but the odds were good. You know what I mean? Well, interestingly, females can store sperm. So if she mates with more than one male,

she can actually have babies in a single clutch that come from all of the males that she made it with. Dang. So she can start up like a like a doomsday prepper of sperm. It's good for her. And so when you're doing your work, does the work progress kind of slowly because you have to collect every three field seasons on a certain population? Is there enough data?

Do you feel like or does it go slow? There's a ton of data. OK. And there's so much that we still don't know about sea turtles. So we have a lot of things we can investigate and continue to find new avenues to figure out the answers to our questions. But we have so much data on our hands that we need people to help us analyze it. That's for sure.

If someone wanted to be a coloniologist, I believe that's the term I looked it up. If someone wanted to add that to their resume, how do they become someone who gets to hang out on an island and talk to baby sea turtles? We actually have two positions, which we posted yesterday. Whoa, to hire two field research assistants to go to the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands again next season

to monitor the nesting females and count the number of hatchlings and eggs that are produced. But in order to usually get those jobs, you need some sort of experience. So I would suggest volunteering, networking with people, talking to scientists. If you're interested in doing that, email them and say, hey, I'd like to come volunteer for you. Do you have any space?

Nice. Most of the time, scientists will take you up on it. You're going to get like 50 emails or like, listen, I listened to one podcast about turtles, but there's sea turtle scientists all over the world. So I'm not the only one. There's thousands of us. So wherever your fancy is, if you're on the east coast, there's I don't know.

There's got to be at least 50 sea turtle scientists on the east coast. Really? Yeah, all of them down the east coast. I don't even know that there were east coast sea turtles. Oh, yeah, there's a ton there. I had no idea. Leatherbacks, Nestir, loggerheads, greens. So Kemp's Ridley are mainly in the the Gulf, so you'll find them in Texas. So yeah, if you're in Texas, you can go to the Kemp's Ridley.

Yeah, there's turtles all over the east coast. I had no idea. How are they doing so much navigating? What's their GPS situation like? So I'm probably not getting the wording correct, but they have some sort of magnetism in their head that allows them to align with the Earth's magnetic field. Oh, my God. Yeah. P.S. I tried looking this up for hours in a hotel room at midnight, googling

how sea turtles magnet head and getting ass deep in wonderful papers such as, quote, evidence that magnetic navigation and geomagnetic imprinting shape spatial genetic variation in sea turtles by colonologists, Jay Roger Brothers and Kenneth Lohman. I learned that perloman sea turtles are, quote, exquisitely sensitive to the Earth's magnetic field, which helps them use geomagnetic imprinting to return to their exact birthplaces to nest later in life.

But after at least 90 minutes of reading through studies and articles, I have no idea if they have like a magnetic rhinestone or a small goblin in their brain that helps them sense these fields. I never figured that out. Somebody tweeted me. So that's why sea turtles sort of imprint on where they were born. And that's why they tend to go back to where they were born to do their breeding and their nesting again.

So once they're supposedly it's once they start crawling down the beach, they get that imprinting in their head. So they'll tend to once they reach sexual maturity, go back to that area. So once sea turtle hatchlings go down the beach and they go out into the open ocean, we call it the lost years because they're out there for 10, 15, 20 years. And we don't know what they're doing besides eating, of course. But then they recruit to these foraging grounds. And then that's where they'll spend their time getting fat and happy

and getting reproductively primed to then go do their migration. So they tend to use that magnetism to find their way back to their foraging ground and back to their nesting ground. Is that reproductively good or bad? I mean, if they're all returning to the same spot, is it possible that they might be related or no? You know what I mean? In a population that has very low numbers of turtles, it's possible.

But what we have to remember is that 20 years ago when those turtles were conceived, it's unlikely that their relatives are also coming back at the same time frame that they are. OK, that's my thought is if there's a large enough population, I don't think we have an issue with inbreeding. But if we're talking about 10 females and 10 males, maybe a little bit of a problem. Well, you know, but royalty did it. I mean, royalty was like, you're my cousin, I'm royal, you're royal. Yeah, that's true.

Let's keep it in the family. Side note, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt's maiden name was Roosevelt. She married Franklin Delano Roosevelt, her fifth cousin. And at their wedding, her uncle, President Teddy Roosevelt, just casually said to the press, it's a good thing to keep the name in the family. Oh, and Queen Elizabeth at age 13 fell in love with her second cousin once removed, who was also her third cousin via another circular branch of the family tree. And that's now her husband, Prince Philip, who at 97 has just an adorable

colonial logical air about him. Well, how do you find a sea turtle nest? Is it very easy to find or are they pretty good at cloaking it? They camouflage those things so well. They're really good at flinging sand around and patting it. And they kind of there was a video I watched last night of an olive really kind of doing a dance on her nest after she finished and was camouflaging it. But they they pat it down really well and just flinging sand everywhere.

So once they finish, it's hard to see that she even had dug a hole there. Well, how do you how do you as a researcher locate them? Often we're waiting for the females to come up and then you kind of take a peek, see what they're doing. And if they're not actual digging the hole, then you just keep passing by them and come back to them later. So most often it's the female showing us where she's digging the nest. And then we can take a GPS waypoint or put some sort of a data logger in there

so that we can find it again in the future. And then does she head back into the ocean and then you're like, let's check out what's going on in this nest? Well, once they're laying their eggs, they tend to go into a little bit of a trance. So often we'll sneak up behind them and then sort of because they like to cover their nest with both of their flippers is they're laying to protect it. So you can kind of lift it up just a little bit and peek in and see how many eggs that she's laying before she covers it up and then takes off.

And once she lays it and covers it up, she's she's outie, right? Yep, she's done. So then she'll wait off shore for about two weeks and then she'll come back up and lay another nest. Oh, she's like, I'm going to make some siblings for you guys. Yep. How long are they cooking in that nest? Depends on the temperature. So if the temperature is warmer, then they'll cook faster, of course. So they really are kind of cooking.

Oh, yeah. When the when the temperatures get warmer, they definitely incubate quicker. Yeah. And so do you have to be on the island to keep watch of it? Or do you go back periodically? Our scientists here in Hawaii are on the island for six months straight. So they're camping for six months straight. Camping. Camping. What do you mean by camping? Like in a tent or a tent?

Really? For six months? It's a decent tent. It's a very nice Denver tent and they have wood platforms that they put their tents on. I didn't know what a Denver tent was. And I thought maybe it was some kind of survivalist lean to. But then I looked into it. Hot damn, these tents are fire. They're those sprawling, cream colored canvas structures that you imagine

Queen stayed in while they were on a safari. Just gorgeous and sturdy. Their website boasts the best frame, the best materials, the best style, the best for the middle of nowhere. So they've been American made since the 1890s. They cost about one to two grand. And if you Google Denver tent plus glamping, you might literally die from swooning. But I'm sure the tent lust wanes when you're counting turtle eggs for like six months.

I wouldn't go as far as saying glamping, but OK, it's as nice as you can get for field research camping, for sure. And they have another tent which they use for their kitchen and cooking and their data entry, but each person has their own tent. Oh, so the people who go decide to do that, like six months out of the year. Yes, B.R.B. Tent Island. See, is that people who are very passionate about turtles or who don't like people? Well, it's usually people who are very passionate about turtles or wildlife.

Yeah. OK. Unfortunately, they are up there with two to maybe seven people on one island. So you do have to have very good interpersonal skills because you're stuck on an island with the same people for six months. So if you don't like people and you're stuck with the same people, could be detrimental. Do they have satellite phones, internet? They do have satellite phones, which allow them to download email

and call loved ones every once in a while. But they're mainly disconnected from the world. I hope that there are turtle biologists who are married and in love and who are just like, this is our life. We have one tent for the two of us, please. You know what I mean? We have those people. Really? Yes. What do they like? They're incredible.

So the past two seasons, we've had two field researchers, Mary Lou and Jan Molem Stamman, and they have been married. They met doing sea turtle research in Bon Air. Going to cry? Yeah. So they've been up there the past two seasons and they're incredible. They work really well together and do amazing things. Oh, someone needs to make a Julia Roberts film about this. Yeah, for sure.

Just a some khaki clad couple in love. Oh, I'd watch it. Their outfits are usually a bit better than khaki, though. Really? Oh, yeah. What are turtle researchers wear? On our islands, there's issues with bird ticks. So they tend to wear lots of long, tight pants, long socks to keep the bird ticks from getting in and lots of long sleeve shirts.

And they're pretty much covered up as much as they can be. But when it gets hot, of course, they wear shorts. But oh, bird ticks. Lots of fun colors is whatever dorky stuff you can find at Ross. Sponsored by Ross. Do you like being on beaches? Are you a beach person? I am a beach person. I've always been around a beach my whole life.

I lived in San Diego, lived in Australia. Now I live in Hawaii. I think even though I might not go to a beach every day, knowing that it's there is like core to my being. But what's funny is I actually hate camping. So it's it's interesting that now I'm doing field research, which sometimes does require me to do that and dig holes and shit in it. And, you know, very roughing at type things.

But it also means you get to go to these places that nobody else gets to go to and experience these things that. People would just love to do. Yeah. So you take it with a grain of salt. Yeah, you know, I don't really like camping. But guess what? I get an amazing experience out of it. So. I love those those smug pictures. It's like a laptop on a beach.

It's like my office for the day. You could do that all day long. Yep, people are like, just stop. OK, so we covered a lot of general turtle parts in test pseudonology, but I asked Cameron to run me down some sea turtle, anatomical nuttiness. They have a three chambered heart, which is really cool. Three chambered heart. What else?

So their penis doesn't close all the way. They actually have a groove that the semen comes down through. Damn, it's pretty groovy. It's a groovy dick. I love it. What else? Their nose. So everything about them, right, feels leathery, but their nose is soft and squishy like a dog's. Oh, I didn't know that.

It's super cute. Oh, my God, do they have claws on their paddles? They do. So green sea turtles have one claw on each flipper. Interestingly, when the males reach sexual maturity, those claws start to grow so that they can hook onto the female's carapace and hold on, right? So thirsty. And then hawkspills actually have two claws on the on all flippers.

Yeah. And then their organs are all just laid out underneath their their carapace and their and their plastron and their plastron to do surgery on a turtle. Does that ever happen? Oh, yeah. Uh-huh. Oh, to get things like plastics out. No, most the time when we do surgeries on turtles, it's actually to remove a flipper because it's got entangled in fishing line and it's dead.

So you can remove the flipper and they'll be fine. They can still swim. Otherwise could be a shark attack that also removed a flipper that you need to sew up. We've had some instances where turtles have been hit by a boat and the propeller cuts into their carapace and you can, you know, hook it back together and they'll they'll be fine and you can release them.

Will it regenerate and grow back together? They get scar tissue that comes back up. I also know that, say, for example, they do get bit by a shark and one of the flippers is removed. They somehow can cut off the circulation to that so that they don't bleed out. Damn. Weird. Yeah. How do they even know that?

What are their brains like? Teeny tiny. Really? Like the size of your thumb, if if anything, their salt glands in their face are bigger than their brain. So, side note, in order to excrete salt from their diet, turtles have salt glands that weep. And sometimes they just look emo as hell. Just crying on a beach like a newlywed dumped on a honeymoon.

But yet they're able to navigate without a computer all over in the dark sea. And they have tiny thumb brains. Tiny, tiny brains. Just a little tiny brain. Tiny thumb. Oh, yeah. That's so weird. It's so weird to like have a dick bigger than your brain.

Oh, it's way bigger, way bigger. I guess they got it easy. Any anatomy I should add? So the leatherbacks are totally different, right? All the other species have hard shells. Leatherbacks have a soft squishy shell. I love them. Is it OK to blow kisses at a turtle?

For sure. OK. Yeah, because I love blowing kisses at turtles. And I talk to them. You do? Yeah, of course. Do you if you're alone on a beach, will you just will you be like, hey, dude, I'm just here to say hi? Well, if it's a nesting female, I try to be pretty quiet around her. But once the females finish and I have like collected samples or measured

or whatever, I do tend to thank them and be like, good luck. Thank you. Might be cheesy. But yes, I do talk to them. I think as well you should. They're your co-workers. Yeah. How do you feel about turtles in pop culture, especially like I feel

like you would deplane in Hawaii and it's like, would you like a shirt with a sea turtle on it? Would you like a key chain with a sea turtle on it? Like, how do you feel about how they're represented pop culturally? I think you're never going to get away from the charismatic megafauna. Everybody loves turtles and whales and dolphins. And I don't have any issues with how they're represented. Turtles are cool.

Everybody loves them. So why not have them on t-shirts? Do people give you a lot of turtle gifts? And you're like, yes, good God, stop with the turtle gifts. My office is full of turtle paraphernalia, none of which I have purchased for myself. I mean, I love turtles, but yeah, you can only have so many trinkets to dust. Right. I figured someone's going to be like, I saw this and thought of you. And you're like, that's because there's sea turtle stuff everywhere.

When you when you've been out in the field, what is the kind of most dangerous thing or the weirdest situation you've been in in the field? Or you're like, oh, this information is amazing. So when I went to Australia to do that study, I talked about before where we found the feminization there. They capture turtles by leaping off the front of the boat onto the turtles. They call it the rodeo style. Oh, my God.

So I think that was the most it wasn't dangerous because they were very safe about it. And I was wearing a helmet, but I was definitely shitting my pants, sitting on the front of that boat, going very fast, chasing after a turtle and then deciding to leap off of a boat to catch the turtle. So you just kind of piggyback on the turtle and there is a turtle like, who are you? They're kind of like, what the fuck? And then what do you do?

Like, does it slow them down? Does the boat catch up? Yeah. So the boat immediately obviously turns off its engines because you don't want to injure the turtle or the human that just jumped into the water. But the goal is to grab at the top of the carapace by the neck with one hand and then in the bottom of the carapace with the other hand by the tail and then invert them so that their face up heading towards the top of the water. And as soon as you kind of get them popped up out of the water, they kind of calm down a little bit.

So of course, I type sea turtle rodeo into YouTube. And yes, this is very much a thing with Australian colonialists. And watching it, my stomach had the same reaction as when you watch videos of people about to bungee jump into a canyon. Just watching people about to jump off a boat onto a turtle. And then from there, are you tagging? Are you taking them on the boat? Are you? It depends on what sort of samples we need to collect.

If they're adult turtles, we will tag them, measure them and take a photo. And then usually let them go and maybe a skin sample for genetics as well. That's how we figure out which nesting beach they were born at. But if they're the immature turtles, like for my study, we need to bring them on board to collect a blood sample from them to figure out their sex. Oh, yeah. Do you ever feel like a turtle's recognized you? No way. OK. I have a feeling that they understand what humans are in the like,

oh, God, they're they're going to eat me or abduct me like an alien and then put me back. Oh, no. They're like, it's one of those weird, slimy, hairless things. Yeah. With no shell. What's wrong with them? Yeah, you're a weird looking dude. Now, I did an episode recently about food anthropology and we did mention turtle soup, which I did not know up until then that it was actually made from turtles.

Is that still a threat to turtles? Is it illegal globally? Do people eat sea turtle soup? People do still eat sea turtles and sea turtle soup. There are locations worldwide where people still collect and harvest eggs and will eat eggs as well. Oh, yeah. I often people don't just put it in soup. They will eat the muscle as meat and stuff, too. Have you ever done that?

No, I've never eaten sea turtle. That would be weird, wouldn't it? Well, some locations it's it's part of their culture. So if you're there working with the local community, it can actually be offensive if you don't eat what they're offering you. So I know some places sea turtle scientists have gone and have eaten sea turtle because the culture offered it to them. OK, that makes more sense.

It's not like you're just going to Burger King and getting a turtle burger, though. Correct. OK, I know. It would be a very like a very heavily weighed decision, probably. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Got it. I don't think most sea turtle scientists would really like to eat their species of interest. Yeah, it seems like it would be a little heartbreaking. Oh, yeah.

I wondered what people said it tastes like. And apparently, number one, green sea turtles are called that not because of their shell color, but because of the green fat pad under their shell, which is visible when they're butchered, which is very sad. And as for eating sea turtle, it's a white meat. One travel writer said it tasted like veal, while a Cora user named Gwen wrote a more poetic account,

which I'd like you to imagine is being read from a worn leather journal by Meryl Streep standing next to a rainy window. Many years ago, we were in the wilds of the Dominican Republic. This was so primitive. The chairs were made of bits of gathered driftwood. It's just open fires, huts, this little restaurant in the back of beyond, miles of deserted beach. Yes, they were serving sea turtle that day.

It is firm, white, delicate tasting, has a taste of the sea. How do you feel about the way sea turtles are portrayed in movies? I really enjoyed Crush in Finding Nemo. I thought he was super cute because turtles are kind of a little dopey and kind of surfer-dude-ish. I don't know. What other turtles do you have in mind that you're thinking of?

I literally don't know any. Oh, OK, portrayed in movies. Those are the only sea turtles I can think of off the top of my head. But yeah, turtles are cool. What about do you feel like a little bit of an unspoken rivalry between land turtles and sea turtles? No, we all work together. OK. Yeah. But do you have any interest in land turtles?

For sure. Oh, really? OK. I'm actually a big fan of snapping turtles as well. Really? Yeah. Why? They're crazy looking. Have you seen them? These are like the snapping alligator turtles. Yeah, yeah. Yes, they look insane. Yeah. So as discussed in the Tistunology episode,

alligator snapping turtles look like, A, God's Dangleberry or B, if a bulky high school football player had anger issues and a falcon beak and was made of kelp. But I love them because they look so cool. They're so angry looking. They're so angry looking. I look them up when I was researching turtle soup, because I guess they make them out of like snapping alligator turtles.

They do. And they're huge. They are huge. And they are. Marley looking. The maddest face ever. They have such a like speak to the manager face, like so enraged. Yeah. Yeah. Those are a great species of turtle. It's funny that there are people out there that are probably like lost a finger

to them or something. Oh, I'm sure. Do you want to do rapid fire round? Sure. OK, sweet. All right. I'm going to ask you these are questions from the patrons. OK, thanks for your questions. So now is the time of the show when we get to questions from those in the Patreon club, which you can join for as little as 25 cents an episode. But before that, it's time to shout out the charity of the week chosen by our guest, coloniologist Cameron Allen.

So she picked this week's portion of some of the ad proceeds to go to the Hawaii Marine animal response, which is h dash m a r dot org. And they focus their efforts on protected marine species in Hawaii, most likely to be encountered and affected, aka dicked over by humans. The animals include the rare and very cute Hawaiian monk seal, the green and hawksbill sea turtles, spinner dolphins, humpback whales and several marine seabird species. So the Hawaiian Marine animal response provides preservation and recovery support.

So keep doing what you're doing. And thank you to everyone on Patreon for making these weekly donations possible in tandem with the sponsors of the show. OK, now back to your listener questions. So we did talk about this a little bit. Annie, Todd McLaren, Sherry, Bridget, everyone did want to know what you thought of the sea turtle representation and finding Nemo. So you were fine with it?

Yeah, it's fine with me. Stacy Phillips on the topic of Nemo wanted to know, do sea turtles really ride underwater ocean currents like Crush does in Finding Nemo? For sure. Do they really? Yeah, they ride currents. So especially when they're when the hatchlings go out into the open ocean and they're kind of out there in those lost years, we don't know what they're doing. They have started to put satellite tags on the little turtles

and found that they do tend to concentrate in those gyres in the ocean. So they do kind of ride in those ocean currents that take them around. And as well in those ocean currents, you sort of get the sargassum that floats at the top, so the turtles will kind of hide in that. They can also find some things to eat in that. So they're actually really good spots for them to hang out. So quick aside, I was like, what is sargassum again? Why does it sound like an old timey soda that you'd get in a frontier town?

Well, it's a brown seaweed that flourishes in temperate and tropical oceans. But the last several years, there have been, shall we say, blooms of it. Barbados has been having a sargassum crisis with berms of these tangled brown rotting mats piled meters high. Now, I went on TripAdvisor's Barbados message board and vacationers are consulting a thread called the seaweed report asking other travelers how bad it is. There are messages titled seaweed problem, seaweed problems.

Dreaded seaweed, sewage and seaweed. So one woman posted frantically about her upcoming beach wedding being ruined by the curse of these sargassum blooms. And several strangers were consoling her. They offered her webcams to check out alternate, less infested locales. And I should note that while researching this aside, it was 5 a.m. I happened to be sitting on the floor of an airport on my way to Detroit. And I found myself following this trail of hyperlinks

leading me to a live video feed of a beautiful, empty island beach, sun shining, waves crashing in real time. And I was just staring into the screen kind of absently mournfully as this woman eating a bagel ran over my foot with her luggage. And then she shot me a look like she wanted me to die. And I boarded the plane last only to find that that very woman was my seatmate. So I avoided eye contact by passing out for four hours. Anyway, sargassum, finding Nemo.

So that's why Crush was kind of a surfer in it. Yeah, I didn't know that. Yeah, go figure. I mean, they're probably not as extravagant as what they showed in the finding Nemo. Right. Oh, I saw the hell thing, dude. First you were all like, whoa. And then we were like, whoa.

And then you were like, whoa. Yeah, they do like to ride some currents for sure. Have you seen turtles surfing? You can see them surfing sometimes, too. Do they really just for fun? Yeah, I think so. Do they hop back out and then, like, you know, they don't come all the way in.

They'll just kind of like hang out in the wave and then, yeah. They're just having fun. Having fun. Good for them. Yeah, no sunscreen necessary, which is nice to them at least. I'm lucky. OK, so a ton of people, including Ray Kasha, Anonymous Bob, Kelly Windsor, Christopher Brewer, Samantha Bass, Alina Belak, Brie Bridger, Jessica Vitarelli and Micah Eckart essentially said in Micah's words,

OK, first team turtle until the day I die. Also, what is the oldest known turtle on the planet? Do we know like how old? I mean, do we even know? I know we covered this a little bit before, but no, I don't think we know. And somebody reach out and tell me who their oldest turtle is. So side note, in Testosteroneology, we did discuss that it's a 187 year old land tortoise is casually named Jonathan.

So I would imagine if they found one on land, there's probably one in the ocean. We just just don't know how old it is. We just haven't been acquainted with them yet. Is there something about their their blood or their metabolism that lets them live that long? Like, do they have like one heartbeat an hour or something? Their heart rate is pretty low and they can actually they don't sometimes don't have to take a breath for an hour, so they can they can slow themselves down really low and they can die for a very long time.

So they are good at just, I don't know, internally shutting down slightly to do to do their business. So side note, I looked this up and I found one research paper saying that leather back heart rates range from 25 beats a minute as they surface for air to one beat a minute if they're on a long dive. Now, the animal with the fastest heartbeat, that one goes to a tiny mammal called an Atruscan shrew, which clocks over 1500 beats per minute.

This tiny, tiny fuzzball has to eat double its body weight a day just to stay alive. And then even then it survives maybe two years. So what the hell is happening here? Well, get pumped for next week's episode on bio gerontology, which is the science of aging. OK, so a ton of people had hatching questions. OK, a ton, a ton, a ton. Sarah Clark wanted to know, you know, how can human beings help sea turtles? And does a human interference help or harm them?

You know, like, you know how there's like, you can go help sea turtle hatchlings somewhere and like ecotourism. What's really going on with that? Should anyone do that? Krista Evanpato said, I'm very interested in doing a volunteer vacation where I can help these new hatchlings safely get in the ocean. There are a number of nonprofit groups out there that offer these kinds of opportunities for volunteers.

I'm wondering if this is a good experience or essentially if this is not good. I would do your research, try to find out what other people have said about them. If they feel that it's a good opportunity. I think in the sea turtle community, it's often thought that if they are collecting the hatchlings and holding them overnight so that people can then release them later in the day or something from a bucket, that can sometimes be detrimental to the hatchlings because they have a yolk sack that they still have that they use for energy and the longer that they are out of the water,

they're using that up and that's what they need to use when they get out into the open ocean to swim away. So the longer they are kept from going out into the ocean to swim away, you could use up their energy reserves. Oh, yeah. Now, what is the point of us helping them get out there? Why do they need our help? If, by chance, there are poachers nearby that like to come and dig up the nest or

collect the eggs or if there's a lot of predators that the birds might swoop down, perhaps in those instances, they could use our help. But for the majority of the time, turtles have been doing this forever. They probably don't need our help. Yeah, they're like, I got this. Yeah, I got it in the bag. They're like, can I handle you tiny turtle? They're like, I'm pretty good.

Yeah. OK. That's kind of what I figured, but I wasn't sure. That's not to say that you shouldn't go down there and enjoy the wonderment of watching tiny hatchlings go down the beach. Doesn't necessarily mean that you have to help them, but going to see it is life changing. OK, so go do that. Will you cry? Will a person cry?

I think that one could. Yeah, it depends on in the on the setting, maybe what's going on in your life. But yeah, it's it's it's pretty cool. I would definitely cry. Anna Thompson wants to know how far is the average migration of a sea turtle? Pretty far or are they pretty chill local? No, they they tend to go pretty far, especially for mating migrations. For example, coming back to Hawaii,

often turtles forage in the main Hawaiian islands and then they go up to French frigate Shoals, which is in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. That's 500 miles between the two. Yeah. Yeah. So that's pretty far. Again, the leatherbacks go all the way across the Pacific to forage. It's often that turtles between their foraging and their nesting grounds are traveling hundreds of miles.

Wow, that's so nuts that they can find it. Leatherbacks, by the by, can migrate up to 10,000 miles a year, which is a greater burden than what I place on my hybrid Toyota. Now, as for that navigation, think about the last time you were lost in a mall parking lot. These mofos find their home beach decade after decade. No street science, no J.C. pennies or red robins to serve as reference points.

Nature is astonishing and we are idiots for ruining it. OK, Bob Clark wants to know how social are sea turtles? Are there pods of them that travel like hammerhead sharks? And also why are sea turtle throats made out of nightmares? Ha, ha, ha. You should totally look that up if you have if you don't know what he's talking about. This is pretty incredible. So for a visual on a sea turtle throat, just picture a mouth.

That's also the pit of Sarlacc or perhaps like a leathery green neck that terminates in a vagina dentata. So going to the papillae, yeah, turtles cannot barf because they have the papillae in their throat. So once it goes in, those papillae keep stuff from coming back up. So it does look like little fine the spines in their throat. Glee. It looks gross, but it's actually not too pokey.

Like when we do net crops, he's to figure out why turtles die. We often look down the throats to see if there's anything in there. But it's actually quite soft feeling. It's not too sharp. Yeah. Why do turtles die? It can be a myriad of causes. OK. Around here in Hawaii, we're having an increased number of turtles caught in recreational fishing line.

So what we're trying to have the fishers help us with is if they catch a turtle to reel it in and cut the line as close to the hook as possible so that there's no trailing line out because what's happening is the turtles are getting caught in the line that's still attached to the hook and then they're getting strangled. No. So it's OK if you catch turtle, just reel it in, cut the lines close to the hook as possible, usually the hook will rust out. It will.

Like a bad lip piercing. Yeah. Oh, God. To the first question, are sea turtles social? They generally are independent living on their own. However, you will see them kind of hanging out together because if it's a good foraging ground, they'll probably all be eating at the same spot as well. Some immature loggerhead turtles, we were trying to find them off of the coast of Southern California and we were finding them in what we call flotillas.

So there would be like a hundred of them at the surface all floating around together. Oh, my God. So some of them do aggregate together and some of them just kind of hang out by themselves. I wonder why. I don't know. I would assume it's warm temperature for loggerheads. They love to be in warmer water. So it could be that that was like a really nice warm spot for them.

Oh, everyone's like, come on, check this out. Yeah, that makes sense. Zach Martellucci wants to know on a scale of one to insanely impossible, how hard is it to be a turtle today with all the shit happening to our oceans? There are a lot of threats for sea turtles, for sure. But it depends on where you live, how bad the threats are. But generally. They have a pretty cool life.

OK, I think most people respect turtles and they don't really want to harm them. But there are instances where people need to live or it's part of their culture or humans like seafood, so turtles get caught in the fisheries, you know. So going back to how can you help turtles? Use reusable straws by bamboo, by some stainless steel straws. OK, use less plastic. Don't use plastic bags. Use reusable bags, use reusable water bottles.

The less plastic you can use that's likely to go in the ocean, the better. OK, because there's plastic everywhere and they're ingesting it. Oof, yeah. Austin H wants to know how strong are sea turtle flippers? Could they cause a concussion in humans? Hell, yes. Really? Oh, yeah, man. I've been bitch slapped by them a couple of times and had some real nice bruises.

You got too close. Oh, yeah. Do you think they knew they were hitting you? Sure. I mean, they just they want to get away from you as much as possible. So they're just. I mean, their instinct is to swim, right? So they just want to move and get out of the way. And so, yeah, they're going to swing those flippers and they're really strong.

If you were if they were on the ground and you were walking past them and they smacked you, they could probably break your leg. Oh, my God, that's nuts. They're super strong. Man, that is it's like a it's like a leathery bitch stick. OK, boom. Bonnie Fairbanks wants to know why is the only place sea turtles just chill on land? Probably because there are no natural predators.

But is that true? There's actually three places where sea turtles come up on land just to hang out. Oh, so it's Australia, Galapagos and Hawaii. Oh, OK. But that's it in the world. The other time they're just cruising. Yep. The only times they ever are on land is when they're hatchling coming out of their nest, going out to the beach to swim in the ocean.

Or if they're a female coming up to lay in it and to lay their eggs. Oh, but here we're really lucky where all sizes, all sexes of turtles are coming up on the land, hanging out. Why is that? We're thought it's for thermoregulatory purposes. OK, to kind of bask in the sun. OK, but they also come up at night. So that might not be the real reason why they're doing it.

It could be just resting. It could be to avoid predators. But we do have sharks here and sharks like to have a little munch on turtles. Oh, poor turtles. I can't believe my flight leaves in a few hours and I didn't see a turtle. I was here. I know I did it wrong. Oh, man, in a house to come back. I'm in a hotel room talking turtles, but I didn't even see a turtle.

But still, but this makes me just want to come back and see turtles more. Sarah wants to know, do you have a favorite turtle buddy or do you study a whole bunch? Do you have a favorite? I guess we talked a little bit about Big Mama. Yeah, I would have to be Big Mama. Yeah, I love that that's now her name. Yeah. Oops, we named her. Um, Marisa Brewer asks, do you see turtles

mind us swimming and snorkeling along with them? Is that OK for them or should we avoid those activities? And then a bunch of people essentially ask, is it true that if you touch a turtle, you will die? So it's best if you keep a safe distance from turtles. It's totally fine to be snorkeling in the water at the same time turtles are. But you want to be careful for your safety because they can bite you or slap you and hurt you. As well, if turtles become habituated to humans, it's not in their best interest.

So keeping a safe distance is good, but you can be in the water with them. If you touch a turtle, no, they will not die. OK, but because all sea turtle species are on the endangered species list, it's actually illegal to touch sea turtles. Is it? Yes. Hands to yourself, hands to yourself. I didn't know that they were all in the endangered list. Well, they're covered under the Endangered Species Act.

So not all of them are endangered. Some of them are threatened. And why is that? Because of commercial fishing and. It's a ton of different threats. Climate change is a big one as well, because a lot of turtles like in Hawaii, they nest on low lying atolls. Currently, there's a lot of different things that would put sea turtles on the

listing for endangered species. So it's illegal to touch them. It is illegal to touch sea turtles. Grant Wells, Jamie Peterson, all asked about that. Don't touch a turtle. No. Amanda Niren wants to know, for turtles that eat jellyfish, do they not get stung or do they just eat jellyfish that don't sting?

Who I don't know the answer to that. I think they do eat jellies that have the capability of stinging. And interestingly, they actually eat the tentacles most of the time, because that's where a lot of the nutrition is. I don't know if they don't get stung. My thought is, is that because they have the scoots, maybe they aren't as sensitive to the stinging because their skin is a bit more leathery. Yeah.

I don't know the answer to that, but I'm assuming that it must not bother them too much because they like to eat jellyfish. I mean, they must just gobble them up. There's some pretty cool videos of leatherback turtles eating the shit out of some jellies. You should check it out. So of course I watched videos of a jelly nom fest and it's very cute. And then also very sad because you see just how much these wispy floating snacks look very a lot like plastic bags.

Just Google jellyfish plastic bag also, but maybe don't. By the way, is this a good time to mention that oligiesmerch.com has canvas totes? Check it. Just get a canvas toe from anywhere. Just let's just knock it off the plastic bags. OK, when not being catfished by our garbage, what do turtles eat? Kathleen Rowland wants to know, do sea turtles really get high on seaweed? No. OK, I don't know. Maybe koalas don't get high on eucalyptus either.

Dang it. They're just any of them just defined like a weed forest and humbled and go hog wild or no, because it doesn't happen. I don't think so. Lindsay Freshmouth and Jen, we both want to know what can humans do to save endangered sea turtle species? What can the humans do? What can we do? We just love turtles.

It's essentially what everyone's saying. Plastic is a big issue. OK, so you use recycled everything that you can, use less plastic. Also, walk, ride your bike, take public transportation, do whatever you can to decrease the effects of climate change. So you don't necessarily have to go scoop up babies out of a nest? No, but you can get a bus pass. Right, OK.

I think the best effects that you're going to have as an individual human being is being responsible yourself for decreasing your impact on the planet. That's a good soapbox to be on. Yeah, good job. And now what's the shittiest thing about your job? What's the hardest part about it? Hardest, annoying. Mm hmm.

I'm finding it difficult to figure out where the fine line is of advocating my science and just telling people what the results are. Because I'm finding more these days that there's either a distrust of scientists or there's not a belief in scientists when in reality we're just very curious individuals looking at something that we're interested in and we're finding out answers and want to tell it to the public. Often we're just told just tell people the science, but don't advocate for it. And what I really want to do is tell people

what we're doing is finding that sea turtles are sentinels. They're telling us shits going on and we need to listen to them. Because if we don't, we're likely all in trouble. But you can't always say that or you're told not to say that. So I'm trying to figure out where the line is of. Yeah, letting people know what the science is, but also being an advocate for it. Going back to the let's not talk about climate change thing, the main sea turtle nesting beach for green turtles in Hawaii was just obliterated

by a hurricane, likely because the sea surface temperatures were so warm that it caused the hurricane to go into that path. We have turtles telling us and their nesting beaches being obliterated, showing us that this is for fucking real. Yeah, pay attention. And so as a scientist, people want you to just deliver like black and white graphs and not tell your message. We're trying to figure it out.

How to how to say the message without getting political, right? Yeah, yeah, podcasts. Go on podcast. Can you stop warning us about climate change or just let us die already? Yeah, what's the best thing about your job? The best thing about my job is I get to be curious every day. I get to learn something new every day. I get to work with amazing people that that's all that they want to do too,

is be curious and learn something new. But also because I do work hand in hand with the federal government, all of the research that we do directly applies to the management of the species and their conservation. So I'm really lucky in that being an academic, sometimes you publish papers and you hope that those managers find your research and they pick it up and they use it to benefit the species, or at least where I work now, everything that we do goes into helping

the species. That's that's a pipeline right there. It's 100 percent a pipeline. That's great. Yeah, that's got to feel gratifying. It does. Yeah. So Cameron out there checking on turtles, putting out her work and changing the world one flippered friend at a time. She tweets links to the articles she publishes and her handle is at Cameron D.

Allen, and I'll put a link in the show notes. How much do you love her and turtles, right? Okay, grab shell, dude. But thank you so much for being on. Yeah, first podcast. Super cool. Yeah, you did it. You're on a podcast.

Thank you so much. I'll never look at sea turtles the same. I love a turtle. Easy to love. OK, so again, she's Cameron D. Allen on Twitter and we're at Allergies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm Allie Ward with one L on both. And thank you to the patrons at patreon.com slash allergies to everyone who gets

merch at Allergies and merch.com. Thank you, Shannon Feltas and Bonnie Dutch for managing that. Thank you to Aaron Talber for admitting the wonderful Allergies podcast Facebook group. Thank you to my two new interns, Harry Kim and Caleb Patton, who are way too good for me. Nick Thorburn wrote and performed the theme music and assistant editor and host of the podcast, My Good Bed Brain, the wonderful Jarrett Sleeper helped out. And always thank you to editor Stephen Ray Morris, host of the podcast, Sea Jurassic Wright and the Percast for writing the long currents of production

to piece these episodes together every week. And if you stay tuned to the end of the show, you know, I tell you a secret. OK, and then a new 2022 secret. Sometimes, you know, you're like, I'm having anxiety. I know I have to deep breathe, but sometimes it's so hard to fill your lungs when you're feeling a little bit anxious. And I started thinking about it more like if I fill my lungs up, I can push things away that are stressing me out, kind of like angioplasty,

which is where they use a balloon to push plaques from your arteries away. So I think about filling my lungs and like pushing like anxious plaques away. And then I started thinking about anxiety, like anxio. And I was like, oh, when I deep breathe, that's kind of angioplasty. So I think of my lungs like a balloon pushing away. Things for me that are stressing me out. So angioplasty, it's a term that only I use, but it works. OK, thanks for listening.

New episodes in the week after next and they're going to be good. You guys are the best. OK.