Travelling fellowship reports

Lucie Brown, 31st Annual International Sea Turtle Symposium, San Diego (2011)

I recently graduated from the University of Exeter, Cornwall, with a degree in conservation biology and ecology - inspired by my first encounter with an olive ridley sea turtle on a Mexican beach in 2006. At the time, I was working as a volunteer for Ecologistas de Nayarit, a small organisation based on Mexico’s Pacific coast. Their focus is conserving olive ridley sea turtles along this stretch of coast, where the females come to lay their eggs during nesting season. Olive ridleys are classified as vulnerable in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2011, because of overexploitation of turtle eggs, due to it being a local delicacy, and high rates of bycatch, when turtles are accidentally caught in fishing nets.

My experience as a volunteer introduced me to the magical and diverse world of sea turtle conservation, and I have now decided to follow a career preserving these reptiles. I hope to achieve this by expanding my knowledge and initiating my own research into areas that are fundamental for turtle conservation in the long-term.

 Sea turtles in Mexico

Receiving the travelling fellowship grant is one of my proudest achievements to date, and the money enabled me to travel to San Diego in April to attend the 31st Annual International Sea Turtle Symposium. This was a monumental step for me. Without the travelling fellowship I would not have been able to attend the symposium and present my research to the sea turtle conservation community.

My research focused on the effects of artificial incubation on olive ridley hatchling fitness. The method of sea turtle hatchery management used in the majority of projects across the globe is to relocate nests from the beach to safe areas known as hatcheries, where the eggs are reburied and guarded from poachers and predators. Once the eggs hatch, the baby turtles are released into the sea to begin their epic life journey.
Along the Pacific coast of Mexico, artificial incubation, which uses polystyrene boxes to incubate eggs, is becoming a common alternative. This is mainly because illegal poaching is common on nesting beaches and funds to protect the sites are lacking. My research aimed to assess the effects on hatchling fitness of this method.

I identified fundamental differences between hatchlings incubated in a hatchery, compared with those incubated artificially. Hatchlings incubated in boxes are not active immediately when they emerge from the nest. In contrast, those emerging from reburied nests enter what is described as ”frenzy mode” almost immediately. This information is vital to hatchery managers as the behaviour of hatchlings at emergence determines the most appropriate time for them to be released.

My study was very well received at the symposium and I met some influential and experienced sea turtle biologists, whose support and advice was both inspirational and insightful. It was a pleasure to meet the pioneers in sea turtle conservation and the experience has fuelled my passion to continue working towards the conservation of this precious marine species. My heartfelt thanks go to the Society of Biology for the generous grant.

Peter Coals, Understanding the elephant-shrews of northern Mozambique (2011)

It can seem that all we hear of the natural world is the destruction of wild places and the loss of species, and, unfortunately, this is the case in many countries. I have witnessed the plight of Mozambique’s forests, and have seen illegal logging stations and freshly butchered bush-meat being confiscated from poachers.
During my time in the UK, undertaking a degree course by day and writing grant proposals by night, those forests began to feel increasingly distant. However a burning question kept the memories alive - was there an undescribed subspecies of giant elephant-shrew, or sengi, running around on the Mozambican forest floor, overturning leaf litter with its long nose in search of the insects that make up its diet?

Information on giant sengis (Rhynchocyon) in northern Mozambique is scarce, despite being home to the first species of giant sengi ever described. The chequered sengi (Rhynchocyon cirnei) was described by Wilhelm Peters in 1847. It is now recognised as one of six subspecies of Rhynchocyon cirnei, ranging from south of the Congo River to north of the Zambezi in Mozambique.

Descriptions of the six subspecies were published by Gordon Corbet and John Hanks in 1968. In their work a note, inconspicuously placed on a map annotation, suggests that they suspected an undescribed seventh Rhynchocyon cirnei subspecies existed in northern Mozambique.

  Peter examines a Chequered sengi

Back in Mozambique, I sat with Dr Galen Rathbun, IUCN Afrotheria group chair and an expert on the sengi, in the blistering heat of the Mareja Community Reserve in the Quirimbas National Park, almost directly underneath the distribution point for that elusive seventh subspecies.

Catching giant sengis requires patience, as they are not attracted by bait and rarely use paths on the forest floor. We simply had to put down as many wire cage traps and gill nets as we could, in the hope that a sengi would stumble into one. Checking the traps at regular intervals kept us busy throughout the day. By night, I often found myself, under Galen’s guidance, preparing museum specimens by the light of a head-lamp.

The forests of Mozambique are a far cry from the laboratory environment, and DNA analysis of our specimens back in Oxford is still awaiting completion. However, morphological comparisons with various taxonomic collections have been completed. These indicate that the seventh subspecies is unlikely to be valid - the giant sengis from northern Mozambique appear to be the same as those described from near the Zambezi by Peters all those years ago. So, unless the DNA proves us wrong, we did not discover a new subspecies and scientific immortality continues to evade me.

I am grateful to the Society of Biology for the travelling fellowship that contributed to this work. I continue to work with local and international collaborators to preserve the north Mozambican coastal forest, united under a newly appointed (if already discovered) flagship species, whose survival is inextricably linked to these threatened forests - the chequered sengi. 

    
Peter Coals is an undergraduate reading Biological Sciences at the University of Oxford. He is also a trained Safari Guide and has conducted biological expeditions in Africa and the Neotropics.