Born Free

Category: Sea Sense | Date: Nov 20 2008 | By: bornfree

We have had a busy week. One team travelled north to Tanga near the border with Kenya to hold introductory meetings with Regional and District government authorities in preparation for starting turtle (and other marine) conservation activities in the area. The other group headed south to complete the judging for the primary schools’ recycling and marine conservation competition.

Just south of Tanga there is an island called Maziwe which until about 30 years ago was vegetated and which was one of Tanzania’s most important turtle nesting grounds, particularly for the green and olive ridley turtles. However, all the trees were cut and it now remains as a sandbar which is completely covered by sea during the spring tides. Turtles continue to nest there but the eggs are inundated and do not survive. We expect to work with a local group, Friends of Maziwe, and other interested parties to start closely monitoring turtle nesting activity on the island and moving eggs to mainland beaches just a few kilometers away. There are a number of popular hotels along this stretch of coast and many have already shown an interest in supporting us and local communities to initiate a successful turtle tourism programme. We plan to hold a stakeholders meeting before the end of 2008 to look at the options and discuss relevant issues.

The primary schools; competition has been a great success. All the school entries, from both students and teachers, have been collected and the final ceremony will be held this weekend to announce the winners and hand out the prizes. There will be about 200 official guests and we hope that many hundreds of local residents will also come and watch the songs, drama and artwork.

Next week we hope to conduct an aerial dugong survey in the Rufiji Delta where several live sightings have recently been made. A microlight will be used as it can fly low and slow. Fingers crossed that we will see some and that the weather is calm and clear. More on the results of that at the end of next week.

Thanks, Catharine

Tags: dugong, Sea Sense, turtles