How tracking sea turtles helps their conservation

Working underwater, the ORP team has been collecting data on sea turtle occurrence, abundance and distribution in coastal waters.

ORP is a UK-based charity organisation with projects in Kenya, Maldives, Oman, Pakistan and Seychelles.

In Kenya, ORP started with support from The Sands at Nomad and Diving the Crab in Diani, Kwale county.

Its main objective is to increase the knowledge and understanding of sea turtle distribution in marine ecosystems and the major threats these creatures face along the Kenyan coast.

It also aims to build local capacity, particularly within sea turtle research, conservation, monitoring and rehabilitation. 

ORP Kenya project coordinator Leah Mainye said to achieve these objectives, the team usually goes for scuba dives to conduct underwater assessments.

“We have mapped 13 dive sites along the Diani-Chale marine reserve on an 18km stretch of the reserve, with the sites covering about 3km of reef in total,” Mainye said. 

These are Dzinani, MV Funguo, Galu, Igloo, Jadini, Kinondo, Kisima Mungu, Kongo, Milele, Mwanamochi, Mwayanza, Tiwi and Twiga. 

To collect data on the sea turtle population coverage in the different sites, she says, the team uses a unique technique, Photo ID. 

“This method is non-invasive, whereby we don’t have to touch the turtles while underwater. It is also low cost and easy to do," Mainye said.  

GEARING UP 

The Kenyan ORP team consists of five members.

Project manager Joanna Hancock, in-field supervisor Jenni Choma, project coordinator Leah Mainye, community education and outreach officer Juma Gwerenya, sea turtle monitoring assistant Ali Mkasha and an intern, Diana Kerubo.

Mainye and her team get up early so that they make it to the dive centre by 7.30am. 

Geared up by 8am, they assemble themselves as they wait for hotel guests who are going diving to join them.

“The diving gear, as well as going for the dive itself, is very costly,” Mainye said. 

“We get support from Sands at Nomad hotel and Diving The Crab, who facilitate us with the gear we need.”

A camera plus the casing that comes with it costs between Sh121,455 and Sh202,425. 

It costs Sh15,000 to go for a single dive, a watch costs Sh25,000-30,000, a mask Sh70,000-100,000, fins Sh5,000-11,000, and a regulator Sh30,000.

“The suit costs Sh10,000-12,000 and there is also the Buoyancy Controlling Device (BCD) jacket as well as the oxygen tank,” Mainye said.

“We are grateful as we usually get all these for free as we don’t pay anything.”

At the dive site, they have already mastered some skills on how to look for and find these turtles. 

“They tend to camouflage sometimes but the good thing about these turtles, they usually just use one area as their resting place,” Mainye said.

“Even if they go up for air and come back, they still go back to the same place.”

Underwater, there are areas that the team refers to as Turtle Cafes, where turtles can be found resting, and Cleaning Stations, where all marine species go for removal of algae, parasites and dead skin cells by fish.

Mainye said when they dive, they go checking in these places for turtles.

Once they come into contact with these creatures, they begin by taking pictures of the left and right side of the faces. 

Just like human fingerprints, faces of turtles differ even if they are siblings as they are asymmetrical.

“At ORP, to confirm a turtle in any of our dive sites, we take photos of the right side, which we use,” Mainye said. 

“We take photos of both the left and right side, but we will only take it as a confirmed case if we have a photo of the right side.”

“If one of us goes out diving and manages to get both sides, then it is fine. If they get the right side, then it is automatically a confirmed case.

“If we get the left side, we will consider it as a candidate but not as a confirmed case. We give out the number as a sighting but not as a confirmed case.”

Apart from photo IDs, they also record the behaviour, growth, any disease or markings that the turtle exhibits. 

"At around 1pm, we come back to our laptops to compare our findings," Mainye said.

“We check and recheck our database as we compare the photos. We might have taken 50 photos and out of all of them, there are only four turtles. 

“We do it manually, although we have other ways that we can confirm that it is the same turtle we encountered.”

To determine this, Mainye said they have codes for turtles they encounter. 

“As we dive, we add more turtles to the database. We do this every day, and if we get the same number, we record it.”

“If we don’t find the face of the turtle on our database and it has no tag, we consider it a new confirmed case on the dive site, and it gets a new code.”

ORP records sightings by noting down how many times a specific turtle has been encountered in each dive site. 

They also code adopted turtles and always alert the adopter about their whereabouts. 

ORP data shows since 2018, 21 green turtles have been Photo ID’d, of which 12 are female and nine are male.

The total number of hawksbill turtles Photo ID’d is five, of which two are female and three male. 

The data also shows that on the Diani-Chale marine reserve, 587 green and 79 hawksbill turtles have been catalogued. 

Of the 587 green turtle species, 90 per cent are juveniles, seven per cent are sub-adults, while three per cent are adults.

Of the 79 hawksbill species, 77 per cent are juveniles, 20 per cent sub-adults and three per cent adults.

While making their recordings, ORP also takes the measurements of the depth at which they encountered the turtles and the time. 

The team dives an average of 8-20 m deep since most turtles can be found 10-13m deep.  

“In a week, we try to have a minimum of three dive days (six dives) and a maximum of five (10 dives) because we also need to do a bit of computer and office work,” Mainye said. 

They also do wreck dives, which average 25-28m deep as most adult turtles can be found at such depths. 

According to ORP, wreck dives have the lowest number of turtle sightings, with one hawksbill and seven green turtles sighted by the team.

Since 2018, there have been more than 3,212 green turtle sightings and more than 499 hawksbill turtle sightings. 

“The numbers look like this because we might find there is an individual turtle we have sighted more than 100 times,” Mainye said. 

“The number of sightings might increase but the number of turtles is the same.”

FUTURE PLANS

Mainye said the quality of data they have depends on the dives they do, with the more the dives done, the better.

“If we can cover all 13 dive sites in a month and with consistency,” she said, “then we can most definitely have data where we can confidently deduce that this month we had this number of new turtles and the previous month the number was up or down by a certain percentage.”

ORP has embarked on training the locals on underwater assessments, data gathering and management.

This is because they aim to increase the number of data scientists who can safeguard and keep track of these marine creatures. 

They are also planning to work with other organisations to come up with a standard coding system.

Among its plans to expand, Mainye said, the organisation is looking into tagging turtles with tracking devices as another way of studying their behaviour.

She said it is an expensive method that requires getting funds and licences, and it will be a big challenge because it will not be an easy task tagging them as most of their activities are done underwater. 

“Even though it will be a challenge, it is equally important that we look into investing in tracking as it will allow us to study the turtles’ movements,” she said.

“Last year, our manager succeeded in partnering with Tiwi Turtle Police, where they successfully tagged adult sea turtles.”

EVIDENT CHALLENGES  

Some of the challenges the team faces include poor visibility underwater, hence some photos taken are not of good quality.

Even though the team’s dives are sponsored, they sometimes get to use the boats only when they are free. 

“Ideally it is not a challenge, but when we do have a lot of guests, then we are unable to use the boat, we skip the dive,” Mainye said. 

A change in weather means that no boats can go out.

They equally fail to go out, and this in turn creates a gap in their data and research. 

Apart from the numerous challenges that the turtles face while underwater, such as bycatch incidents and boat strikes, these marine creatures also suffer from fibropapillomatosis (FP).

This is a tumor-causing disease that affects sea turtles and causes cauliflower-like tumours to form on the skin anywhere on the body, including the eyes and mouth of turtles.

Mainye said according to their data and sightings, green turtles are the only affected species.

They have recorded 75 green turtle individuals that are suffering from the disease. 

“FP can affect juveniles, sub-adults and adult turtles. Here, we have seen that it affects the eyes, front and hind limbs, shoulders and the neck regions,” Mainye said. 

“Once we sight a turtle that has FP, we take a photo and make sure we monitor it.

“We haven’t deeply researched much on the disease, but we are partnering with other stakeholders like researchers and scientists to find out how the turtles get affected, how the disease can be treated, and why it naturally occurs and disappears.”

The research in itself is intense and requires a lot of funds. 

“For now, we are monitoring the cases and how it elapses with time,” she added.

Mainye said that they had a case where a turtle they were monitoring had its tumours naturally disappear but they are yet to know and understand how it happened. 

“According to research, we know that pollution in the ocean is one of the factors that lead to the growth of FP tumours on turtles,” she said.

“We sometimes think it might be true because most of the turtles we encounter that suffer from FP are in Mwachema/Kongo river.” 

“The greens in this dive site record the highest number of FP infections, and we think they are affected by the polluted water from Kongo river.”

COMMUNITY REACH

In 2022, ORP did a pilot study with the local communities to better understand their perception of sea turtle conservation. 

Gwerenya said having worked with nine beach management units (BMU), they discovered that these individuals know sea turtles but unfortunately don't know much about them.

This year, ORP has developed a programme where they are looking to engage the fisherfolk communities in sea turtle conservation. 

This will involve teaching locals more about sea turtles and the threats they face, while training and engaging them on bycatch mitigation and ghost gear.

“We also want to educate them on the sea turtle code of conduct so that in cases where they encounter a turtle, they know what to do and how to go about it,” Gwerenya said. 

Apart from working with relevant stakeholders, Gwerenya said they also want to incorporate women and children in the education programmes. 

“We also want to collaborate with the Conservation Education Society in education programmes for school students and vocational centres.”

So far, the only problem they have encountered is interacting with the local communities. 

“Some people are receptive to interaction, others limit the information they give us, which is insufficient, so we cannot assess what they know and what they do not know,” Gwerenya said.