Never-a-dull-moment week, Part 1

 Apologies for the lack posts (to my millions of followers, haha), the past week has been absolute craziness.  This is a good thing in that sort of pandemonium, never-a-dull-moment type of way.  One week yielded some great diving, a lot of dead animals, even more live ones, and a bunch of outreach…let me explain.

So after a somewhat frustrating day in Tagbilaran last Monday (see my last post), several of us headed to Panglao to de-stress and finally do the tourist thing.  Note: if you are looking for tourists in Bohol, you can find them in Alona Beach.  It’s your typical hot country strip of sand covered in dive shops, bars and resorts.  I don’t think I’d like to spend too long there, but it was a great way to unwind for the night.  We ate Thai food, had a few beers with our toes in the sand, and played some silly dice game. 

The next morning, Vale, Dom and I took the day off and did two dives at probably the best known dive spot in Bohol, Balicasag Island.  The dives were spectacular- great corals, lots of fish and TURTLES!  Primarily greens, but I think there may have been a hawksbill in there somewhere though I can’t be certain.  The one odd part of the whole day was the HORRENDOUS diver that was on our trip with us.  She was a super nice lady, but absolutely the worst diver I have ever seen.  I am not actually sure how you can be so bad, especially since tropical water, shallow diving really doesn’t normally take a ton of skill.  She had no control of her buoyancy and the poor dive master had to literally hold on to the back of her the entire dive.  If he let go she would go careening around out of control and hit coral.  The oddest part, she seemed completely unfazed by it.  As if this was the way she thought scuba diving worked.  It really didn’t impede our diving too much, though I felt pretty bad for our dive master who made his money that day.  In between our dives we hung out on the boat, enjoying the sun.  Lovely.

Now while we were off being dive-bums in Panglao, poor Tch had received a message about a turtle stranding.  In between our first and second dive, I got an excited call from her.  Unfortunately the turtle was dead, but it was a LEATHERBACK!  Obviously, I squealed, which may seem a weird reaction to a dead animal, but leatherbacks are a secret passion and I have never seen one, alive or dead.  They are listed as critically endangered around the world, and no more so than in the Pacific.  They are also just really fascinating creatures- the largest sea turtle, existed during the time of the dinosaurs, travel immense distances across oceans to eat jellies!  This was only the second time a leatherback had been seen in Bohol and they aren’t known to nest anywhere in the Philippines, though to they do elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Tch managed to secure the turtle and when we arrived back to home to Jagna, she had transported it to our porch.  The hope was to necropsy it the next day, but the tricky part was going to be preserving it in a somewhat decent state until we could do so.  While the turtle was small for a leatherback (97cm carapace), it was still a big, heavy animal and there was no fridge/freezer available that would fit it.  So we wrapped up the already smelly creature in tarps, stuck the whole thing in a kiddy pool, and packed as much ice as we could buy at the local shop around it.

At some point in the night I awoke to a really a really strong smell of dead, rotten turtle, but just thought that the wind had shifted.  Not so.  I got up early the next morning to discover our hopes of delaying decomposition had failed.   Miserably.  Unfortunately, the turtle had likely been dead a while, plus it is just so freakin’ warm here, that the next morning I woke up to find that decomp had gotten the better and it had leaked blood and fluids everywhere. Unbeknownst to us, the kiddy pool we had put it in had a hole in it so the leak was not contained. Instead, there was turtle goo all over our big porch/veranda that we eat on/work on and it smelled beyond awful.  So at 6:30 in the morning I was in my bikini (since any clothes I put on were going to get covered in vile juice) with a mop and ankle-deep in the nastiest smelling stuff ever, trying to clean it up.  At one point, a local family came by to check out what the smell was about and they sat there, watching me swear and push rotten turtle juice everywhere in my bathing suit.  No wonder they think we are weird.  It's hilarious in retrospect, but at the time it was not the most enjoyable way to wake up.

Dom and I had finally finished cleaning up the stinky goo and were in the process of trying to get organized about when and where we would do the necropsy, when we heard yelling from outside.  We open the door to find a guy who had come to report they had just ‘rescued’ a stranded turtle.  I got Tch on the phone (she was in town getting more ice for our decomposing leatherback friend) to chat with him in Cebuano to make sure I was understanding him correctly (really, another turtle?!), and indeed, there was now a live turtle at the municipal hall.  We hopped on a trike to meet Tch there and arrived to the find an enormous hawksbill female in the back of ambulance surrounded by on-lookers.  It is great that the locals that found this animal were concerned about its welfare, the only thing was, this turtle was fine and was in no need of rescue.  It was alive and kicking and didn’t have any external evidence of trauma or appear ill.  She was now fighting like mad and we decided that the best thing would be to put her right back.  My guess was that she may have been trying to nest in that area (it’s been known to have hawksbill nests in the past).  The people that found her said she appeared stuck in some mud, which might have been the case, but she definitely didn’t need any further care.  Tch was holding the turtles head to keep its formidable beak in check (hawkbills have what looks like a bald eagle beak- big and powerful) and Dom and I used some sheets and water to keep her cool and took some measurements.  We convinced the ambulance to drive us and the turtle back and it was a bit of an adventure.  The turtle, by now over the shock of being plucked from the beach, was fighting for her life.  As we bumped along in the back of an archaic ambulance (and break-neck speed of course since no one drives like a sane person here) we struggled to keep control of a feisty and incredibly strong turtle.  At one point, Dom and I were literally using both our body weights to try and keep her still (so she wouldn’t injure herself or us) and she was still able to push up with her flippers. Needless to say, we got her back to the beach and she took off like a rocket.

Ok, so one turtle dealt with, one more to go.  The next struggle was figuring out what to do with our stinky friend.  Unforunately, since decomp was already so far along (and only getting worse despite our desperate attempts with ice), most of the tissues would be too far gone to learn anything from.  However, we still wanted to open the turtle up to look if there was any plastic ingestion (a major killer of leatherbacks since floating plastic bags look just like their jelly prey).  Once we opened up the animal though, we would need somewhere to dispose of it.  Of course, like all bio-nerds, we wanted bury it somewhere accessible so we could keep the bones once the flesh had been eaten by bugs and microbes.   

You'll notice in this post that the responding team was pretty small.  Everyone else was out of town, except for the three of us, so it was a bit chaotic.   Tch, the hero that she usually is, spent the afternoon back in Duero (where the turtle was found) trying to arrange transport and disposal. She worked her magic and later than afternoon we loaded ourselves and the dead turtle into a dump truck with a bunch of city garbage workers who were HORRIFIED at the smell and kept wretching, which goes to show how bad it smelt if guys that deal with old, hot garbage all day couldn't handle it.  By then the rest of the crew had arrived back from out of town and accompanied us to Duero.  We necropsied the turtle in the back of the dump truck, but unfortunately it was so far gone that a lot of the organs weren't viable anymore (kind of like soup).  We didn’t find any plastic, but did discover that what we thought was a female (because of the short tail) was actually an immature male.  Go figure.  The gross biologist in me was so into it, especially seeing the cool barbed esophogas that I had only ever seen in pictures.  Once we were done, we dropped the remains swathed in a net into a big hole, where it will remain for at least a year. I will spare you most of the gory pics...

In the cab of a dump truck!

Leatherback mouths are cool

Packaging the remains for burial.

In the never-a-dull-moment style of the week, upon getting home, cleaning up and eating it was time to crash for a few hours in preparation for our 5:30am departure time for Pamilacan where we conducted a two day workshop.  More on that and report of more animals (alive and dead) in my next post.

PS.  I have less than a month left here.  Madness.  Where has the time gone?