Memorial Day Stranding in Cherry Grove

On Memorial Day, a leatherback sea turtle washed up on the beach just north of the Cherry Grove Pier.

Steve and Barb responded to the call from SC-DNR to identify the animal.

After speaking with DuBose Griffin and confirming that the turtle was a leatherback - a very endangered turtle - they decided to come to North Myrtle Beach to necropsy the turtle. Because these turtles rarely wash up on our shores, any additional data is valuable.


















This is the latin name for the leatherback.










DuBose assessed the turtle as a juvenile, even though it was about 6 feet long! An adult could be almost twice that big.


Here she is spraying the carapace with orange paint. This is done so that if the turtle were to be found again (at sea, in a landfill, buried, etc.), it would not be reported as a new find.

After measurements were taken and recorded, the turtle was rolled over with the help of a couple of bystanders. Help was definitely needed; this turtle was probably 500 to 600 pounds.

Finally, Dr. Shane Boylan, a veterinarian from the SC Aquarium, started the necropsy. Not the most pleasant smell as you can tell from the boy holding his hat over his nose.

The final report on this turtle was that it had a longline hook in its small intestine with several feet of monofilament trailing behind it.

First Real Nest of the Season

Yesterday, May 21, Waties Island had it's first real nest: there was a crawl just above Marker #4 and a nest. This appeared to be the same turtle as the false crawl from the day before; we could see the same scrape mark in the middle of the track. Charlotte Hope of the SC-DNR thought this mark was most likely caused by a barnacle on her plastron. We called her "Barnacle Betty" and we'll look for her in the future!

Unfortunately, our island fox was at the nest before the walkers. She dug up the nest and really made a mess. We found 15 eggs outside the nest and only 2 inside the nest. This is a very small number of eggs. But this appears to be a very small turtle too; the width of her track was only 1' 6".

We did cage the two eggs and placed a marker at the site. A full team photo will be posted soon! Congrats to the Wednesday team on the first real nest!

First Crawl !!

This morning, the Tuesday walkers discovered a crawl on the lower end of the island, between Markers 1 and 2. It was a beautiful sunny day, although quite windy.

This was a smaller turtle - track width of 1' 6" - but it had a distinctive scrape mark down the middle. There were a few fox tracks at the nest site, but no digging.

The team probed and dug and probed some more, and dug some more, and probed some more, until finally we decided to remove the top few inches of sand. We repeated the probing and digging for almost an hour and a half and were unable to find the nest. We have labeled this as a "False Crawl" and marked it with a white plastic pipe marked "FC 1". We'll need to keep an eye on this nest to see if there is any fox activity in the future; if so, we will cage it.

Congratulations to the Tuesday Team - Shirley, Terry, Rita, Bob and Sandy!

Hey everyone! The new website is finally up and running. Check it out at http://www.coastal.edu/cmws/projects/turtles/index.html.

What a beautiful morning for a long walk on the beach and we were rewarded by finding a turtle! But....Not the kind we were looking for. Around marker 3, we found a beautiful Diamond Back Terrapin (As identified by Karen ), laying in the wet sand by the water line. He was about 6 inches long. Because the tide was still coming in, we moved him back to the dunes line and continued on our walk. Returning from the jetty, we searched for him but he had already continued on his journey and was not to be found. Karen emailed me that they live in salt marshes. This one may have got caught up in the currents which swept him up on the shore where we found him. Otherwise the beach was quiet although we did see many fox tracks so know the fox is also making rounds, looking for nests. Linda