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

Episode Date: January 29, 2019

If you think you like sea turtles, 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 ResponseSponsor links: kiwico.com/ologies, zola.com/ologies, & trueandco.com/ologies More links at www.alieward.com/ologies/cheloniologyBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologiesOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter or InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter or InstagramSound editing by Steven Ray Morris & Jarrett SleeperTheme song by Nick ThorburnSupport the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

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 Testidonology 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 gotta 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. Most 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. PS, 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. Colonialogy, 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 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 fieldwork 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, biologist 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 percent. I have a t-shirt that says turtle nerd on it. Do you really? For sure.

Called it. I should have worn 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 they just like, your heart gets one? 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. Like everyone's got an old uncle that looks like a turtle, bald, maybe a little frowny. Maybe up this when 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. And so now your journey into Turtle Nerddom, where did that start? Randomly 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, super basic dumb 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. And it's like, 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. So I know when I say we're going to give you a flipper, I mean millions of years of evolution in 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 on an old turtle body. 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 their 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. Side note, 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.

Now, so hormonally, how, or I should really ask, from a, 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 vacutine or 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? No, they get to go back in the water though. They're like, bye. Yeah.

Bye. Thanks for loving. 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, 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 just 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 get to go 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. Oh. I'm originally from San Diego. Do we have sea turtles in San Diego? We sure do.

We do? Yes. 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, West Coast, man. We've got the ocean, got the waves, got the sun, we've got the waves. 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've got some powerful pectoral fins. 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'm 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. Wow. 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 has got a new world record! Sea turtles are like, oh, 17 minutes and four seconds? And 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? They're 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 they're mouth breathers.

Oh, we're seeing neck-feared mouth breathers. Yeah. They're cuties. Mouth breathers? 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 grain sea turtle I've ever seen in my life. Damn, she's thick as fuck. 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.

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 Rosatul to weigh 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 special. And just 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 ores 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 70s and 80s continue to be resided at that same location every year. So there have been turtles that they've sighted 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 in two 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 though. 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. So expensive. Oh God. And yeah. Also the stretch marks. I'm just cruising a salad bar in Fiji being like I gotta feed these babies I'm gonna make. 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. Okay 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 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 it 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 having big issues with losing nesting habitat, collection of eggs and actual animals for meat as well as bycatch and fisheries. So 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? Okay there's the green, the loggerhead, kemp's ridley, olive 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? Turtlesfly2.org. Okay so why do these species who have been around for a hundred 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. Turtles just 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 doing on the global warming front in 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 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 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 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 tends to happen, that warmer temperatures will incubate female eggs, I mean that's crazy. It is crazy and I get asked this question a lot and I don't have a good answer for you. 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 our lady baby turtles? So we've looked at a couple 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 are 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's 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 gram 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 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 different things to try to produce more male turtles. Oh my god. 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. 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 do quite a bit. Okay. So there's maybe just less competition. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder if that means we're going to see like buster turtle babies because it's like well your dad's 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 mated with. Dang. Crazy huh? Yeah. So she can store it up like a doomsday prepper of sperms 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. Okay. 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 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 didn't even know that there were east coast sea turtles. Oh yeah there's a ton there. I had no idea. Yeah so leatherbacks nest deer, loggerheads, greens. So Kemp's Ridley are mainly in the Gulf so you'll find them in Texas.

So yeah if you're in Texas you can go and do 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. 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 coloniologists 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 birth places 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. How crazy is that? 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? She's a distant cousin but she's not too distant with me. 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. That's my thought. 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. Royalty did it. I mean royalty was like you're my cousin, I'm royal, you're royal.

That's true. Let's keep it in the family. Also 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 colonialogical air about him. 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 Ridley kind of doing a dance on her nest after she finished and was camouflaging it but 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.

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 actually 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 outy right? Yep she's done so then she'll wade off shore for about two weeks and then she'll come back up and lay another nest.

Oh she's like I'm gonna make some siblings for you guys. 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 temperatures get warmer they definitely incubate quicker. 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 is it really? It's a decent tent it's a very nice Denver tent and they have wood platforms 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 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. The people who go decide to do that like six months out of the year, BRB, Tent, Island, Sea, 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, 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. The past two seasons we've had two field researchers, Mary Lou and Jan Molam Stamman and they have been married. They met doing sea turtle research in Bonaire.

You're 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. Someone needs to make a Julia Roberts film about this. Yeah, for sure. Just a kaki clad couple in love, oh I'd watch it. Their outfits are usually a bit better than khaki though. Really?

Oh yeah. What did 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. Oh bird ticks. Lots of fun colors, 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, I 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. What's funny is I actually hate camping so 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 very roughing it 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 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 smug pictures it's like a laptop on a beach it's like my office for the day you can do that all day long people are like just stop.

Okay 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. Crazy that is crazy.

Yeah it's a pretty groovy dick yeah 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 females carapace and hold on right so thirsty. And then hawkspills actually have two claws on all flippers yeah. And then their organs are all just laid out underneath their carapace and their and their plastron to do surgery on a turtle does that ever happen? Oh yeah. To get things like plastics out? No most of the time when we do surgeries on turtles it's actually to remove a flipper

because it's got entangled and 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 be fine and you can release them. Will it regenerate and grow back together? They get scar tissue that comes back up and 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 even yet they're able to navigate without a computer all over in the dark sea and they have tiny thumb brains just a little tiny brain oh yeah that's so weird it's so weird to like have a dick bigger than your brain oh it's way bigger I guess they got it easy any other crazy anatomy I should add

mmm so the leatherbacks are totally different right it's all the other species have hard shells leatherbacks have a soft squishy shell I love them is it okay to blow kisses at a turtle for sure okay yeah cuz I love blowing kisses at turtles okay and I talked to them you do yeah of course do 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 be like good luck oh thank you might be cheesy but yes I do talk to them I think what 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 keychain with a sea turtle on it like how do you feel about how they're represented pop culturally I think you're never gonna 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

gonna be like I saw this and thought of you and you're like yeah that's because there's sea turtle stuff everywhere when you're 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 where 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 mm-hmm 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 mm-hmm as soon as you kind of get them popped up out of the water they 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 have 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 it's crazy 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 huh yeah do you ever

feel like a turtles recognized you no way okay I have a feeling that they understand what humans are and the like oh god they're they're gonna eat me or abduct me like an alien and then put me back 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 we'll 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 okay that makes more sense it's not like you're just going to Burger King and getting a turtle burger though correct okay yeah no it's if 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 well a Korra 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 doodish I don't know what other turtles do you have in mind that you're thinking of I literally don't know any okay 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 okay yeah but do you have any interest in land turtles for sure oh really okay yeah I'm actually a

big fan of um snapping turtles as well really yeah why they're crazy looking have you seen them these are like the snapping alligator turtles 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 looked them up when I was researching turtle soup because I guess they make them out of like snapping alligator turtles and they're huge they are huge and they are really looking the maddest face ever they have such a like speak to the manager face like so enraged yeah um 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 and oh I'm sure do you want to do rapid-fire round sure okay sweet all right I'm gonna ask you these are questions from the patrons okay 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 first sometimes I like to call patrons and just have a convo about sponsors of the show which depending on how many plays this episode has gotten you may or may not hear but before that it's time to shout out the charity of the week chosen by our guest colonologist 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-mar.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 okay now back to your listener questions so we did talk about this a little bit Annie Todd McLaren uh Sherry Bridget everyone did want to know what you thought of the sea turtle representation

in 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 um 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 trip advisors 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 five 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 then you were like whoa yeah they 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

no sunscreen necessary which is nice too for them at least i'm lucky um okay so a ton of people including ray kasha anonymous bob kelly winzer christopher bruer samantha bass alina belac brie bridger jessica vitarelli and mica eckard essentially said in mica's words okay 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 what who their oldest turtle is so side note in testosteroneology we did discuss that it's a 187 year old land tortoise who's 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 huh 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 which is crazy now the

animal with the fastest heartbeat that one goes to a tiny mammal called an atreskin 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 okay so a ton of people had hatching questions okay a ton a ton a ton sarah clark wanted to know you know how can human beings help sea turtles and does the human interference help or harm them you know like you know how there's like you can go help sea turtle hatchlings somewhere like ecotourism what's really going on with that should anyone do that uh christa avampado 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 sac 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

okay 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 okay 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 how far is the average migration of a sea turtle pretty far 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 signs no jc pennies or red robins to serve as reference points nature is astonishing and we are idiots for ruining it okay 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 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 it looks gross but it's actually not too pokey like when we do net crops used 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 oh yeah why do turtles die can be a myriad of causes okay around here in Hawaii we're having an increased number of turtles caught in recreational fishing line so what we're trying to how 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 okay if you catch turtle just reel it in cut the lines close to the hook as possible usually the 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 um 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 two 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 mm-hmm but it depends on where you live how bad the threats are but generally they have a pretty cool life okay 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 okay use less plastic don't use plastic bags use reusable bags mm-hmm use reusable water bottles the less plastic you

can use that's likely to go in the ocean the better okay 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 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 gonna 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 okay boom um 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 okay 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 female coming up to lay 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 okay to kind of bask in the sun okay 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 i have 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 um sarah wants to know do you have a favorite turtle buddy or do you study a whole bunch do you have a favorite too i guess we talked a

little bit about big mama um 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 okay 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 it 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 um as well if turtles become humid 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 um if you touch a turtle

no they will not die okay um 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 acts 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 um 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 oh 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 by the way is this a good time to mention that oligiesmerch.com has canvas totes jk just get a canvas tow from anywhere just let's just knock it off for the plastic bags okay we're not being catfished by our garbage what do turtles eat kathleen rollin wants to know do sea turtles really get high on seaweed no okay i don't know baby koalas don't get high on eucalyptus either dang it they're just do any of them just define like a weed forest and humbled and go hog wild

or no i guess it doesn't happen i don't think so lindsay freshmouth and gen 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 okay 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 okay 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 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 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 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 oof 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 which is insane 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 you 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 uh 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 of 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 article 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 smart people easy to ask stupid questions okay so again she's cameron d allen on twitter and we are at oligies on twitter and instagram i'm ali ward with one l on both and thank you to the patrons at patreon.com slash oligies to everyone who gets merch at oligiesomurch.com thank you shannon and feltas and bonnie dutch for managing that thank you to hannah lipo and erin talber for admitting the wonderful oligies podcast facebook group thank you to my two new interns harry kim and kaleb patten who are way too good for me nick thorburn wrote and performed the theme music and assistant editor and host of the podcast of my good bed brain the wonderful gerrit sleeper helped out and always thank you to editor

steven ray morris host of the podcast sea drastic right and the per cast 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 oh my friends okay the secret is i didn't want to i don't want to say the secret because i don't want to sound whiny but it is 551 am in a hotel room in new york my day started out in la 23 hours ago i flew to detroit today to give a speech at a museum for 800 people but as soon as my plane landed i got a message that the event was canceled because a blizzard was on its way so i literally had to run to a ticket counter and ask for the next flight to new york run to that gate and escape

detroit before the storm hit so now i'm in new york a couple days early and because of these travel snafus i'm pulling just a bit of an all nighter to get this up but i have some cold dunk and donuts coffee i just ate a granola situation from the mini bar i'm good to go um also i'm in my yellow sweater because it's like wearing a hug with sleeves and also tomorrow i'm going to eat just a cauldron of ramen and try to find cheese tea in new york so thank you for letting me tell you about my snowstorm woes i love making the podcast though okay bye meteorology zero and a half shall drill power