While playing with my children on a beach on a barrier island off the coast of North Carolina, I talked to a man walking his dog.
The National Park Service put a sign on the turtle nest that said it was protected.
It would be great to know when the baby turtles will come out. I pondered. He said that they were working on that.
Turtle Sense is a novel, inexpensive way to monitor turtle nest activity. How it works is described in a new study.
The man I met on the beach and the founder of the Hatteras Island Ocean Center was one of the participants.
I worked to understand how baby turtles use motion to coordinate their activities.
If humans know when the baby turtles will show up, they can protect the hatchlings from harm. It has been hard to predict emergence.
We were able to see when the baby turtles would emerge from the sand and swarm towards the water by placing a simple sensor in the nest.
Female sea turtles lay their eggs in the ocean a few times a year. They return to the water after laying their eggs and burying them in the sand.
Eggs are laid beneath the sand for a while. The hatchlings come out of the sand and run towards the surf. A sea turtle's life is at risk at this time.
Birds and crabs are waiting to prey on hatchlings. Light pollution from beach houses and hotels can cause people to become confused and die of dehydration on the beach.
The six species of sea turtles found in the US are protected under the Endangered Species Act, so beach communities are required to make sure that baby turtles receive proper protection on their journey to the water.
The amount of time that has passed since the nest was laid is what scientists use to estimate emergence dates. Volunteers can watch the nest from dusk until midnight if it is in a populated area.
This can take as long as two weeks and require a lot of volunteer hours.
The TurtleSense monitor was tested on the Cape Hatteras National seashore, which is near the northernmost point where loggerhead sea turtles lay their eggs. State and federal agencies worked with us.
Fishermen and off-road vehicles use the beaches. Conflict has arisen due to beach closings to protect turtles.
We wanted to protect turtles while still allowing other uses of the beach.
The eggs were monitored using a device that measured how quickly they changed.
A plastic ball the size of a turtle egg was embedded in a small circuit board with a chip that was connected to the accelerometer.
The monitor was buried under the top 10 eggs in 74 turtle nest.
A cable was used to connect the sensor to the tower. Researchers were able to monitor activity in the nest with the help of the tower.
Scientists think baby turtles may use temperature signals to time their emergence at night, when it is safer for them to go to the sea.
Even if we don't fully understand how it happens, our research shows that motion may be an important factor in sea turtle sibling communication.
Sea turtles are similar to corn popping in boiling oil. When popcorn is evenly heated, it all pops at the same time.
In a sea turtle nest, when the temperature is right and motion activity ceases, we believe this final quieting down could signal to the baby turtles that it's time to leave the nest.
The tree frog and land turtle are two species that have been documented by scientists. It's difficult to detect this type of communication in sea turtle eggs.
The method for predicting when a nestful of baby turtles will attempt the trek to the ocean was developed using Turtle Sense data. The data from the monitor allowed us to see that turtles hatch in waves, quieting and then moving together, seemingly in sync.
hatchlings will emerge from the nest in an average of 3.8 days. We can change the prediction date once hatching ends.
Turtles will usually come out two nights after they are hatched. One night after the hatchlings have hatched, they may emerge from the shallow nest.
infertile nest can be detected by the system, which shows no hatching activity. Monitors can focus on other things if they know that a nest is infertile.
It's inspiring to see newly hatched sea turtles.
My colleagues and I hope that Turtle Sense will allow more people to observe turtles. The sensors can help facilitate protective measures such as monitoring and turning off lights.
We were able to see previously unseen developmental events in the early lives of sea turtles, and raised interesting questions about how animals may process vibrations and communicate.
The plans for the sensors and communication towers can be found at the Nerds without Borders website.
The associate professor of psychology is from the University of Virginia.
Under a Creative Commons license, this article is re-posted. The original article is worth a read.
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