Born Free

Category: Sea Sense | Date: Jul 09 2008 | By: bornfree

I recently returned from a trip along the coast south of Tanzania’s capital Dar es Salaam. This stretch of coast is about 65km long and most is ideal turtle nesting habitat. We normally record about 100 green turtle here nests a year. Because it is so close to Dar es Salaam it is very disturbed and we are doing all that we can to minimize disturbance to nesting turtles and hatchlings from hotel development, fisher camps and illegal fishing activities, especially dynamiting. This is achieved mainly through education, public awareness and production of guidelines for tourism building (e.g. lights). While down there, we spent some time with the managers of two luxury hotels with whom we are promoting turtle tourism. We relocate some nests that are at risk from inundation to their beaches and in return we receive donations (modest unfortunately) from their guests. In this way, turtle protection in this area is becoming sustainable as these funds help pay for the community Conservation Officers as well as small nest incentives that are paid out when a turtle nest is reported.

Our main problem at the moment is nest predation by mongooses and red ants. The latter attack the young turtles as they come out of the eggs deep in the sand. We are minimizing the risk from mongooses by surrounding the nests with chicken wire and covering them with fishing net (this is removed a few days before hatching). For the red ants, we are trying a variety of things such as placing cold ash at the bottom and top of the nest.

Next week we are back off to the south coast to do some training with hotel staff. We have 4 University of Dar es Salaam undergraduates with Sea Sense for the next 2 months and they will be helping us with the training and with protecting turtle nests.

More next week!

Tags: illegal fishing, poaching, protection, Sea Sense, Tanzania, turtles