Nathan Robinson 0:04
My most memorable encounter with sea turtles was I had decided to, this is where I started getting into sea turtles. I had started, decided to volunteer with an organisation called arcalon, which is the sea turtle Protection Society of Greece. I’ve kind of saved up all year long, working in a couple of bookstores during university to have a little bit of cash to buy a tent and a plane ticket to Greece. And I’d gone to Greece, and I started working with a bunch of other volunteers when we’re walking up and down beaches every single day. And what we’re mainly doing at that point was protecting the nests. We’re at the end of the nesting season, so we’re protecting the nests and waiting till that moment of the hatchlings come up to the surface and run to the sea. I didn’t really have any expectation that I would see an adult. I just thought I was going to see hatchlings going on my time out there. I was actually loving it. And then one day, we had a phone call that someone in one of the ports nearby had found a sea turtle that had been caught in a net and now had a large damage, a large wound in one of its front flippers. The organisation I worked with had a rescue centre in Athens. The idea was, we were going to go along, get the animal, keep the animal on our camp for the day, and then the next day get it to Athens, where it could be treated at the rescue centre. A couple of people went off in the van, and they came back. And they came back, I remember in a big wooden pallet they had, yeah, they had a full size sea turtle with, like an old, like towel, like a wet towel, draped over its head. And it looked so kind of out of place, because this absolute monster, and this species in particular, loggerhead turtles, they’re kind of craggy. They’ve often got dents in their shells, and sometimes their shell kind of peels off and just kind of crumbly. They’re not that the beautiful, kind of picturesque tropical sea turtle that we often see in TV, and it’s just this monstrous, beautiful, ancient thing sitting in a wooden pallet so completely out of its normal habitat, and we had to hang onto it for the evening. I just remember sitting next to it in the camp where we like take shifts, basically sitting next to it just to make sure that it didn’t climb out of the palette, or something like, I know a dog didn’t come up and do something, and just sitting there listening to this animal breathing, because they even when they’re out of the water, they still breathe as if they’re in the waters. And they don’t breathe like we do. They breathe every couple of minutes, and they do these big like their heads raised, they do this big gulp of air, and then they kind of settle back down. I just remember being lost in this moment, like sitting there for hours just watching this thing breed, and couldn’t believe the events that was kind of unfolding. And then in the morning, I keep saying, like we had to get it to Athens, and Athens was about a four or five hour driveway. So at that project, at the time, the way you actually get injured animals to the rescue centre is you put them on a bus, people’s luggage, and you ask the nicest looking person waiting at the bus stop to occasionally put some water on the towel, and then someone meets them at the other end of the bus stop. So we got our turtle on the bus, found our nice citizen to take care of it, bought it as tickets. They kind of wished it. Wished it well its journey. You

Speaker 1 3:33
This is oceans, life underwater, a series exploring our oceans and the fascinating life within them. I’m Hannah sitfall. I’m a zoologist, wildlife filmmaker and broadcaster, and I’m bringing you along as I learnt everything I can about our watery planet. This week, we’re talking Turtles. Sea turtles have been living in our oceans for over 100 million years, meaning they existed at the same time as the dinosaurs, but despite their existence through the ages, multiple species of sea turtle are currently classified as endangered. In this episode, we’re uncovering the secrets behind their survival and exploring why these ancient creatures are facing greater threats now than ever before. This is oceans life underwater.

Speaker 1 4:30
My guest today is a marine biologist and conservationist who is known for his viral work documenting interactions between marine animals and human pollution, and luckily for us, he knows all about turtles. So welcome Nathan. Hey. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you. So where are you joining us from? Today, I’m

Nathan Robinson 4:51
calling in from Barcelona in Spain. Very nice indeed. It’s nice and warm still. So can

Speaker 1 4:56
you please introduce yourself? And tell us a little bit about your work for the listeners. Yeah,

Nathan Robinson 5:02
definitely. Well, I guess, first of all, thanks for inviting me on the show. I mainly work in in sea turtle conservation, and I guess I spent many years on the, let’s say, at the forefront of protecting nesting beaches and patrolling, looking for nesting sea turtles. And now my work has really transitioned into trying to use novel technologies, especially novel camera technologies, to film these animals in new ways, to discover new aspects of their life, but also use that as a tool to raise awareness about the issues that these animals are facing. So try to conduct this kind of outreach on a viral scale, on a global scale, to get people excited about marine conservation and sea turtle conservation, and

Hannah Stitfall 5:45
when did your fascination with sea turtles begin? I mean,

Nathan Robinson 5:51
my parents always remind me that my two cuddly toys as I was a young kid were a little cuddly seal and a little cuddly sea turtle that I inventively called Seely and turtlely, so that probably had something to do with it. I would love to spin this, and I always wanted to protect the planet, but it was more just a fascination of big animals, so I just wanted to work with animals. And I wasn’t smart enough to be a vet, so I went to be a biologist instead. Also, I wasn’t particularly like, I’ve always been interested in sea turtles, but it was as a kid. It was never like, this is my passion. I’m going to work with sea turtles. I just wanted to working. Wanted to work hands on with large marine animals and do something that felt meaningful. And my first opportunity on that road was sea turtles. And it just fits

Hannah Stitfall 6:38
so well. Same here. Nathan, I wanted to be a vet, but I wasn’t smart enough, so I’ve ended up doing this funny how things turn out,

somehow I feel like we’ve won. So our listeners

might have seen you before. Nathan, there’s a video of you taking a straw out of a turtle’s nose, and it went viral in 2015 that I remember this. Can you take us back to that moment?

Nathan Robinson 7:04
Definitely. So I just finished my PhD, and I was, I’d been invited to work on a research project in Costa Rica, on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. I was, I was living out there at the time, running a research station. And another wonderful scientist and good friend of mine, Christine figuener, she was doing her her PhD research on sea turtles, and she had invited me to join the trip because I knew how to handle animals. And I was also looking at the animals that live on other animals. So sea turtles are covered in these things called epibionts, which are barnacles, crabs, leeches, anything that lives on their shell or on their body. I was studying those little critters, which meant every time we caught a sea turtle sea and brought it aboard, I would kind of peer over it, looking, looking to find all these other animals, because they can sometimes give us indications of the health of the animal or where the animal’s been feeding, and give you little insight into the sea turtles biology. And we found an animal with something wedged in its nose, which we had no idea what it was. I actually thought it was an encrusting worm. Sometimes these marine animals have these tube worms. It’s like a worm with a hard carcaris, like calcium shell. And I thought, unfortunately, one had just groaned inside this turtle’s nostril. But when as Alec jumped into action, I grabbed my sasami knife to try to remove it, because it was blocking this animal’s airway. And Chris had the wonderful idea to grab her camera. And as I pulled out this object, I realised that it wasn’t organic. It was a plastic straw. It was it was a strange moment, because we were all like we were all in shock when we discovered this. There was a strange mix of the world needs to know about this, but there was also a strange mix of, I always kind of put it as a feeling of guilt, which is all of us who were on that boat that day, we’ve all used straws before in our lifetime, and I can’t tell you that every single straw that I’ve ever used has been disposed of and recycled of properly, therefore maybe that straw was my fault. So we all kind of had this realisation of like, this is what we’re doing to our planet. This is what I’m doing to the species that we love. But then when, when we finally uploaded the video online, like the global response was just incredible. It was this massive outpouring of the feeling that I got was like, We can do this. Like people saw something. They didn’t want to see this again. And that was there overnight, you started seeing these stop the straw, anti straw campaigns. It kind of very organically and very virally, just completely cover the planet. All of a sudden, you couldn’t walk into restaurant anymore without people at least asking, like, do you want to straw? All of a sudden, there’s metal straws or alternatives everywhere, or people were kind of championing this fight. And it was, I know it’s something that every time I get that straw out, I just feel very lucky to be part of such a cool, impactful moment. Did you

Hannah Stitfall 9:41
ever imagine, though, that that moment would spark a global conversation about plastic pollution on the scale that it did?

Nathan Robinson 9:51
No, I don’t think, I don’t think we did. So I remember the night that happened, I made a short little post on my on my Facebook page. I didn’t have Instagram, and. All that kind of stuff. And I had like, 10 friends or whatever on Facebook, and I did this little story just to say, like, this is the reality of the world we live in right now, and this is keep using single use plastics. These are the kind of images that we need to see. And I went to bed, I remember waking up the next day and logging on to my Facebook, and it already been shared 8000 times. And I, honestly, part of me thought it was like a glitch in the system or whatever, and I kept I’d refresh the page, and every time I refresh the page, like another 100 would be, like, be shared. And this is, I mean, this is kind of some of the birth of the viral sweep and kind of viral outreach that we’ve seen in the last 10 years. I mean, this video was 10 years ago now, it was just amazing. Like I thought I was mainly going to be sharing this message with, yeah, my relatives and my high school friends. I didn’t think the world was going to listen.

Hannah Stitfall 10:55
What kind of changes have you seen in people’s plastic use since the video went viral. So

Nathan Robinson 11:01
straw use is the obvious one, like you can very much see. I mean, it’s just it started a global conversation. But I think what was important about that is that straws was a really easy thing that really didn’t have much of an impact on the vast majority of people’s lives. You could just say, Hey, I don’t even need to use straws anymore, and 99% of people went about their lives completely as before, but started getting a lot of people to think about other things, other plastic objects, plastic bags, things like this that they no longer need packaging on food at the supermarket. So it was, it was really nice to see that change, and I still think we’re a long way from addressing this problem, and the amount of plastic in the oceans we have the data. It’s still growing. It’s still increasing, but I do feel like we are, we are making progress. And just the fact that it is something that we talk about, and just the fact that you can talk to so many people who now, and yeah, when they go to the supermarket, will pick the object that has less plastic packaging, or the amount of people who use kind of bamboo toothbrushes, like the amount of opportunities you have, and the amount of people, I think, are getting increasingly excited about alternatives to plastic has been has been fantastic.

Hannah Stitfall 12:08
Now we know that some people in industry need to use plastics, but do you think the straw movement has led to meaningful changes, or is there still a long way to go? One of

Nathan Robinson 12:18
the criticisms we had was that, like when the video first came out, is so many people came back to us and said, Hey, dude, it’s not just straws. Like there’s so many things you need to address. And our response to that was, straws are one thing to get this movement started up to one thing that we can focus on, because it’s an easy thing. You can drop out of your life. They can start a conversation about other other ways we can reduce ocean contamination, ocean pollution. The reality is we have to do two things. We a have to get to a point we are not producing more plastic, or at least single use plastics that are not being recycled and being reused and being dumped in the ocean instead. But now we also have an incredible amount of plastic in the ocean that’s not going anywhere. So it’s not simply a matter of reducing plastic consumption and disposing of it in better ways. We also need to come up with a way to get all that plastic out of the ocean if we want to stop seeing images like this.

Hannah Stitfall 13:17
We’ll be hearing more from Nathan shortly, and learning more about the fascinating life of sea turtles. I’d like to share Irini story with you now. She is a rescue and rehabilitation Officer at arcalong, a charity dedicated to studying and protecting sea turtles and their habitats in Greece.

Eirini Kasimati 13:39
My name is Eirini Kasimati. I am from Greece, born and raised in glifada, which is a suburb south of Athens. I’ve lived most of my life here in Glyfada, apart from some years that I went outside of Athens and also abroad for my studies. For the past seven years, a little bit more than seven years, I have been the rehabilitation and rescue network officer for Archelon. Arcelon is a non profit organisation founded in 1983 it’s dedicated to the study and protection of sea turtles and their habitats in Greece. Arkalon, in general, designs and implements projects as well as actions for the conservation of the sea turtles. Archelon also combines scientific work with volunteering service. The aim is to basically mobilise society through education and awareness, and the goal is basically a better and more sustainable future for everyone, including the turtles. Of course, they called me about Hermes and of seven. September. He arrived at the rescue centre on the 29th of September in 2018 so I remember receiving the call the day before. It was early in the morning. I was here working, treating an animal when they called me about him first they tried to describe the size of the animal. They told me it’s a big, probably male. So male sea turtles, when they when they’re reaching adulthood, they have a really big tail, and that’s how people, citizens, found him stranded on a beach in Preveza, and I just got a description about his size and, of course, his injury. So they told me immediately that the injury was in the area of the head. So it was a case of head trauma, which is, unfortunately the most common reason why citaros have to be admitted to the rescue centre of arkalan. After the phone call, I had requested, as we were talking with those people, I requested videos and photos. So after a phone call, they sent me over a video and couple of photos. It’s very helpful for me, very, very useful in order to assess the condition of the animal, at least from afar, it’s very important, because even from a video or a photo, you can assess the general body condition of the turtle. A photo of the injury is very important because you can assess if the injury is very fresh, if the animal is bleeding, if it’s an older injury, which all this information basically helps me better assess the cases that are being admitted to the rescue centre before that happens. And it’s also very, very important through videos and photos for me to be able to give the right information and guidance over the phone to the people who are getting involved in the rescue of the animal. I guess after eight years of being at arkalan, I should say that I’m not so emotional. But that’s not true, seeing any kind of animal hurt in any kind of way, especially if we’re talking about a direct injury by humans, is really, really sad, and of course, it still makes me upset. So definitely, it’s not getting easier. Is just different. Every case that we have in here, coming here, admitted to the rescue centre. I think it’s just different. What I always say is, like every sea turtle, every turtle patient that is coming here has its own unique story. Was found by different people in different places, came here in a different way of transportation. So for me, every animal is special. Every animal is valuable that we’re getting here. But cases, of course, like Hermes that we had and we knew that it was a deliberate head trauma, it’s always a bit more difficult to understand why this is happening, and how could someone do that. So my reaction to seeing a video of him, he looked quite weak and not very responsive and active. And of course, seeing the depth and the extent of that injury was very, very sad, and it always makes me and the rest of the team quite upset. But on the other hand, that’s why we’re here. That’s why we’re trying always. We give our heart and soul to try and help every single animal

Hannah Stitfall 18:51
before we take a quick break. I’d love to share a story with all of you about an amazing encounter that I had with the sea turtle, and it wasn’t one of them, it was two. Now, this is going back a few years now, and I had to go and do a wildlife filmmaking job in the Cayman Islands, and we really wanted to get a shot of me swimming with a sea turtle. I mean, I’d never even seen one in real life, so I thought this was kind of far fetched. But anyway, so me and my cameraman, we went down to the beach first thing in the morning, and we were looking and it was kind of an area that they were known to congregate. And all of a sudden we saw one pop its head out of the sea. So me and Ben, we ran into the water, flippers on, getting the snorkels on really, really quickly, and they were swimming really close to the shore. We didn’t get too close to them, but they sort of as we were in the water. The first one started investigating us. It was quite sort of, it was feeding, but it was really inquisitive into what we were and what we were doing. So Ben managed to get some shots of me swimming alongside this shit. Huge turtle. I mean, it was sort of the same size as my torso. And then all of a sudden, my camera rock Ben, he was waving at me and pointing, and I was like, Oh my God, is it shark? Are we gonna die? But I turned round, and there was another sea turtle right behind me. It swam underneath me and then up over the top. So I was swimming alongside two ginormous sea turtles, and first time I’d ever seen them in real life. It was incredible. It really was. But I was a little bit scared when I saw Ben frantically pointing but luckily, luckily for us, I’m still here to tell the tale. Da,

it’s time for a quick break now, but I actually have something very special to share with you. If you head over to at oceans pod on Instagram, Twitter or X, we’ve shared some footage captured by the turtle cam Nathan mentioned, and it really is brilliant to see. Don’t forget that this series, we’re also offering listeners access to some very special bonus content. If you want to get an exclusive look behind the scenes, head over to action.greenpeace.org.uk. Forward slash oceans. Dash podcast. This podcast doesn’t just explore our blue planet’s breathtaking beauty, but also exposes the dangers that threatens it. To find out more about Greenpeace’s work to protect the oceans and how you can support go to greenpeace.org forward slash oceans and

I’m not quite done learning about sea turtles yet, so Nathan, can you tell me just how long have sea turtles been around for?

Nathan Robinson 21:54
We think the first sea turtle evolved somewhere between 250 to 200 million years ago. So that’s back when dinosaurs were roaming the planets. So when dinosaurs were in charge on land, the first sea turtles were heading back into the water.

Hannah Stitfall 22:12
And what is the secret to their survival? Live for a long

Nathan Robinson 22:15
time and just keep going at it, right? So the sea turtle strategy is you live for I mean, these animals can live for 60, 7080, years. We don’t really know how long sea turtles can live for in the wild. When they hit reproductive age depends on the species and depends on the individual. But say, 20 to 30 years, they start laying eggs, and then every time they lay eggs, they are laying hundreds. This depends massively on the species, but if we pick something like the biggest species, like a leatherback, they’ve been recorded nesting up to 14 times in a season, and each clutch of eggs might have say 50 eggs in so we’re talking about 700 eggs in a single nesting season, divided over like a single nest, laid every every few weeks. Then they’ll go away, they might spend a year or two feeding, and then they’ll come back and repeat. And they just keep doing this. They keep doing it, pumping up more and more eggs every single year. And survival rates for the hatchlings are very low. We estimates that about one in every 1000 eggs probably survives to become a sea turtle. So the strategy is not like the mammalian strategy, right? Or the human strategy is you have one or two offspring, and you put all this energy into taking care of your one or two offsprings. Sea turtles don’t really do that. Their strategy is just to pump out as many possible eggs as possible, under the hope that just one will survive. And for that to happen, you just got to keep doing the same thing over and over.

Hannah Stitfall 23:48
So why did the dinosaurs disappear and the sea turtles are still here? Oh, dude, I’m

Nathan Robinson 23:53
loving these questions. One of them, one of the big reasons why we think that say some reptilian survived and some didn’t, is all to do with their eggs from fossil evidence. Most dinosaur, I mean dinosaurs laid eggs, but they laid eggs in kind of like exposed areas, kind of like a bird nest, where you might just put some twigs around, or put a bit of mud around and then lay your eggs on top. So you’re very exposed to changes in temperature, things like this, sea turtles lay their eggs under the sand, where you’re buffered from extreme temperature changes. Same thing happens with say, crocodiles and cocodilions. You they bury their eggs as opposed to laying them out. So one of the ideas is that just the way that they nested actually helped protect them at their most sensitive time.

Speaker 1 24:43
Can you tell us something we might not already know about sea turtles? Come on. So

Nathan Robinson 24:50
I have, I mean, I have, I have one favourite fact that might not be entirely sea turtle specific. I’ve got a couple of good ones about sea turtles, okay, but it’s, it’s. Sea turtle in general, which is we think sea turtles might be able to breathe through their butts. Explain so lots of fresh water turtles the back end of them. It’s called a cloaca. It’s where, like, eggs would pass. That’s where everything kind of comes out the animal. But it’s got a very kind of thin skin and almost functions like gills in fish, and they’ve shown that lots of freshwater turtles, when they’re relaxing, don’t actually need to come to the surface because there’s enough kind of respiration that happens to their back end. And that could also be the exact same thing that happens with sea turtles. They said, No one’s proven it, but they’ve shown it for a couple of different freshwater turtle species, and they’re similar enough that could be a fact that very few people know right now. I also have a more PC one, I guess. I

Speaker 1 25:46
mean, that was great, but let’s, let’s get the PC one as well,

Nathan Robinson 25:49
I guess. So, sea turtles talk. This is something that we actually discovered in Costa Rica, about 2020 17, so six years ago, the sea turtles actually talking in the nest. So when they’re still in their eggs, they start chirping and sending messages back and forth. And we think it has to do with communicating when to hatch. They tend to have the synchronous hatching behaviour. But some research they’re still trying to figure out. So we’re trying to figure out exactly what they’re trying to say. That’s a

Speaker 1 26:18
great fact. I like that a lot. That’s great. And are there any unexpected behaviours that you’ve ever seen in sea turtles that people might not know about?

Nathan Robinson 26:30
So, I mean, the communication side is something that we’re really just starting to tap into. So one of the projects that I’ve been working on in recent years, we call it the turtle cams, where we deploy cameras onto the shells of sea turtles to get a first person perspective of of the world that they’re swimming through. And generally, we assumed that sea turtles were largely like asocial animals. They just we’re not seeing herds of sea turtles moving through sea grass beds like you would having like wildebeest on the Serengeti. But when we started putting these cameras on, we started noticing that a juvenile turtle, and these are juvenile, so this is not for kind of reproductive purposes. Can barely swim past another turtle without checking them out. And sometimes it was territorial. So sometimes it was obvious one turtle got to another turtle. I could fight it out of its shelter or a sort of feeding area, and the biggest would typically win, or the most aggressive would typically win. But sometimes they I’ve got videos of sea turtles literally coming up and like rubbing their heads gently next to each other, or just coming up and just sitting side by side before kind of swimming off on their own waves. It’s very anthropomorphic. My kind of interpretation, maybe, is territorial, and they don’t need to be aggressive to show like, not their dominance, but it looks very passive and friendly, like they’re just like they’re checking each other out. And it’s another one that’s things that we have no idea why, why they do this. And the more people who’ve been studying social behaviour in sea turtles, the more footage this people have been recording. I think the sociality, the social side of sea turtles is something we’ve probably massively underestimated, and this also ties into the fact that it was less than 10 years since we realised that they were talking to each other, and we’ve only just started to unlock the mysteries behind that. So there’s plenty more to be discovered. You

Speaker 1 28:15
touched a little bit on this earlier, but what is turtle cam? So turtle

Nathan Robinson 28:19
cam is it’s basically a GoPro style camera. So it’s a it’s a dive camera, like a sport camera that we attach a a VHF, so a radio transmitter to. We’ve developed a way that we can attach it to a sea turtle shell and it will record, so record the same way you would if you had, like, a head mount and a GoPro. So we get to see the animals swimming around in its natural environment, doing what it would naturally do, so what it eats, seeing these social interactions that I talk about, recording the sounds that they make, figuring out what habitats are important for them and their activity patterns, and looking at their threats, like, are they finding plastic? Are they eating plastic? Are they encountering, say, fishes and their habitat? Are they avoiding boat traffic? And then after a certain period of time, the whole unit actually pops off the back of the animal. It floats to the surface. And then that little VHF, that little radio pinger, sends us a message, basically saying, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here. We drive along, we pick up the camera, and then we look at all the footage inside. I mean, it’s a tool, kind of partly for science, so part of it is to try to understand the mysteries of these animals. It’s a tool for outreach. It’s a tool to give people, regardless of where you are in the world, the capacity to kind of lose yourself for five minutes in being or seeing what it’s like to swim through the oceans like a

Speaker 1 29:38
sea turtle. And what have you learned from doing it so far. I

Nathan Robinson 29:42
mentioned already the the social aspect, where uncovering the kind of drivers behind why they’re sometimes friendly, why they’re sometimes aggressive and and how frequently like, how important social behaviour is to sea turtles, we’re figuring out what these animals. Males are feeding on in the different habitats around the world we’ve just recorded, we just came back from our mission in Mauritania a few months ago, so on the west coast of Africa, where we’re looking at reproductive behaviour, like the interactions between males and females actually in a reproductive site, and how a female might decide which male to approach, or whether it’s the males who are approaching females, or females who are approaching males. So the things that we potentially can find out from this footage is really, it’s really endless, and how

Speaker 1 30:28
has your work evolved over the years? I started

Nathan Robinson 30:33
with this mindset of, I wanted the safety tunnels. I wanted to walk up and down beaches, finding every single nesting female that walked out of the water making sure that she was safe from, say, lights on the beach or tourists or poachers or invasive species like dogs or foxes, things that might actually can even attack a sea turtle, or can definitely attack nests and dig up nests. I really threw myself into that that work for a long time, and then the big change was that straw video. So after spending almost 10 years, most days of every single year, just walking up and down beaches to try to protect sea turtles, I realised that the impact that the straw video had probably outweighed, or had a bigger impact than all the work that I’d done previously, and it reached out to a brand new audience of people, I started realising that, yes, we can part of the solution is to protect these nesting beaches, but part of the solution is to change the behaviours of individuals and governments and nations and businesses on a on a global scale. So since then, my work has really now evolved into, I guess, less from direct hands on conservation, and more into this realm of engagement and inspiration. I would say so so often when I’m trying to design new projects, I start thinking the lines of like, what’s cool, what’s fascinating, what don’t we know? We’ve just discovered recently, and hopefully we’ll have some stuff coming on this soon, that sea turtles are actually fluorescent under certain colours of light. At night, they will shine different colours. So bioluminescence is when an animal produces own light. Fluorescence is when you shine a light and it reflects in a different colour, like if you’re in a club and you’ve got those UV lights, and you see like neon clothes shine different colours. Sea Turtle skin does the same thing. So

Speaker 1 32:26
how is this and why is this something that we’re only finding out now. There’s so

Nathan Robinson 32:32
many mysteries that we just haven’t looked at yet. There’s so many places or so many ways we’ve never kind of, we’ve never put ourselves in the mind, let’s say, the the sensational sphere of these animals. So let’s talk about vocalisations in the nest. The second you put a microphone into a nest, especially when it’s close to hatching, you start hearing all these little chirps, but they’re very quiet. And see, like humans, we don’t live in that environment. We’re walking on the beach where we’re not like with their heads dug under the sand, listening next to these eggs. So these things have gone on for sea turtles have probably been communicating in the nests for 100 couple of 100 million years at this point, and we’ve just never looked so this is the thing. One of the things I love about my job is trying to think about, I mean, sometimes our projects fail, sometimes, like, wouldn’t be really cool for a microphone a sea turtle nest, and we do and there’s nothing. And then other times, we find these like cool, miraculous things. I think for every person, we can just kind of get every little aura inspired events that we can share helps get someone else passionate about sea turtles. And if they’re passionate about sea turtles, they’re going to make those little life changes that they need to make, to make the world a more sea turtle friendly place, and

Speaker 1 33:44
what else needs to be done to help protect sea turtles.

Nathan Robinson 33:48
Climate change is a big one. I’ll just mention quickly what climate change is a is a key threat to sea turtles. And this is another guess core fact about these animals. Sea turtles have something called temperature dependent sex determination, which basically means that temperature during when in when they’re in the egg dictates when they become male or female. Stock chromosomes, like it typically is in humans with x x typically producing females and x y typically producing males. If it’s warm in the egg, you produce females. If it’s cold in the egg, you produce males. So we try to remember with hot chicks, cool dudes, is generally like, that’s what goes on with sea turtles. The problem is, as temperatures rise, you can get this feminization of sea turtle populations, which is great. In the sea turtle population, up to a point you can have one male mate with multiple females, but when you start reducing not having enough males to fertilise the females, who can have these big crashes. And in addition, and once again, generally speaking, hotter nests tend to produce fewer eggs. So as temperatures are warming around the world, we’re seeing a reduction in sea turtle success, or hatching success, for sea turtle nests in lots and lots of places. The eggs are literally cooking in the sand. There’s the decisions we make individually, such as when you leave your lights on, whether you bike to work or whether you drive to work, things like this, but more broadly speaking, who you vote for things like this. These are big decisions that influence issues that can have real world impacts on on marine ecosystems.

Speaker 1 35:24
And what are your hopes for the future of the oceans? I try

Nathan Robinson 35:27
to remain positive when we talk about the future of the oceans. We all know that we’re in a biodiversity crisis right now. You don’t need to go far to see horror stories about all the destruction going on the ocean. But what is nice and what’s amazing is we’ve seen time and time again that with the correct protective measures, it’s insane how quickly the ocean can rebound. There’s so many wonderful examples of marine protected areas, areas where they’ve basically said, okay, no fishing goes on here, no development goes on here, this area, this is just wild, right? It’s literally in a matter of a few years, like months to years, you have a few generations of the different species inhabiting these habitats can rebound so quickly that there’s lots of examples of wonderful examples, especially from the Philippines, and especially from New Zealand, where they declared these we protected areas. And then all the fisheries started coming and fishing around the outside of the marine protected area, basically because so many say fish, and so many populations, local populations, would grow so much in the protected areas that they were spilling out, and it was actually making all these habitats, like more productive for the fishing and the fishers were able to fish, catch more Fish with less effort, because these areas are more abundant, because we decided to take some parts of them and just let nature do what nature does. So my hope is that we start becoming a little bit smarter and we have a little bit more empathy for our oceans. If we can head down that path, I think we’d be amazed at how quickly the oceans will respond, and it will no longer be you have to travel how far to see these beautiful coral reefs and these biodiverse ecosystems. I mean, we can have them around the world, and that’s what I’d love to see.

Speaker 1 37:11
Well, Nathan, thank you very much. Myself and the listeners, we are now experts in sea turtles, so thank you for enlightening us. Oh,

Nathan Robinson 37:20
thank you, George, that was a tonne of fun. Yeah, thank you again for inviting me. That was wonderful.

Speaker 1 37:28
Before we get to the end of this episode, let’s head back to arini story all about Hermes.

Eirini Kasimati 37:36
So Hermes arrived here at the rescue centre. Was admitted. It was afternoon on the 29th of September, 2018 so Hermes head trauma was very severe, definitely one of those very difficult and challenging cases that we have been having for all these years. Thankfully, the brain wasn’t exposed. But what made me very worried from the first time I saw her mise was the fact that the head trauma was right in the centre of the cranium, so we have the brain right under there, and I was quite worried that it might have caused permanent damage. Every single animal that is actually sustaining this kind of injury does develop neurological issues. So a typical problem would be that the sea turtle is unable to dive. I was pretty sure that Hermes was one of these cases based on how the head trauma was looking. I was also doubting from the very first days if he would be able to eat, and unfortunately, I was proven right Hermes when we placed him in a little bit of water on the second day after his arrival, and we tried to feed him. Obviously, he didn’t want or was not able to eat. When an animal like Hermes is arriving, we already know that it’s almost impossible for that turtle to eat. We definitely have to be patient, and the first weeks are critical. Unfortunately, his neurological damage was so severe that he was unable to dive to rest on the bottom of the tank, so he was remaining on the surface. At the same time, he was unable to eat, so he was not eating at all for almost a year, and that meant that we had to perform tube feet for Hermes once or twice per week. We had him on tube feet at the same time, as I do with every animal that we have here at the rescue centre, I was trying to minimise the stress, preventing stress and stressing factors in general. Helps a lot with the healing process and the general rehabilitation of an injured animal. Ed Mies needed to be tube fed, but at the same time, we had to be very careful how often we would take him out. So it was for the absolutely necessary things that we had to do, medications, to feed and also to clean his tank in every turtle patient that we rehabilitate here, it’s very common to have a setback in most of these cases, especially when it comes to head injuries. Head traumas, he wasn’t able to swallow, and that was because of the neurological damage from the head injury. So for a week and a half, I remember that he started to show interest in trying to grab the piece of food that we would offer a couple of times per day, but he was not swallowing. So it seemed that after a couple of weeks that he was making those attempts. Eventually he gave up. We would try to feed him, and he would use his front flippers to just push the forceps and our hands away from him so it looked like he didn’t even want to try anymore. And this was an important moment. It was very sad to see an animal, sort of like giving up from being interested in food to like shoving your hands and forceps away. But it was an important moment in terms of for me to actually realise that we need help, that this is a very challenging case, and I wanted to ask for advice from some other specialists all over the world. I still remember the day when one of the volunteers that we had doing the morning check, she came over to me, and she mentioned that Hermes was trying and attempting to dive for his food. So we had moved him already in a bigger tank, so he had more space to move around, to swim, to test him, basically on his general condition, definitely a breakthrough. And that was after one year and nine months of having him here, he was making attempts for many months. His diving ability was not that great, but it was amazing that he was trying to reach for the bottom every day in the evening, we would drop some pieces of food just to encourage him. We also worked a lot with him with environmental enrichment. So we would insert devices into his tank, like a feeding bowl, for example, or a formation of PVC pipes that would resemble a little cave. So we wanted him to be encouraged to dive and basically to practice it, let’s say So eventually, that took quite a while, but he reached the point where he was able to rest on the bottom of the tank, eat on his own, completely on his own, and for the next months, we make sure that he was able to do all these things completely on his own, and behave like a normal turtle in the wild. Before we release an animal, we need to cross check some stuff to make sure that the animal is swimming, diving properly, without any kind of external help for the releases, we have a specific area that we go it’s really perfect. It’s an ideal little cove where even during the summer months, it doesn’t get very busy, so you don’t have a lot of tourists or people to get them out of the water and explain what’s going on. So it’s very quiet. The Turtles after their release over there, they have direct access to the Saronic Gulf. And from there, they can choose where to go to. So that place is very good. And we went over there to this little cove for her missus release as well, on the 26th of July, 2022 like in every release, we are always very excited the whole team. It’s one of the most joyous things that we can experience here. It’s even more excited when you have an animal being released, like her niece, after such a long time under our care. It was definitely emotional. I cried a little bit afterwards. At the same time, I was quite nervous, if that makes sense. I was just hoping that everything would be okay during the release. We have some turtles that they need a little bit of time to. To understand what’s going on. But with Hermes, it was quite fast that he started to swim in the water, and just very calmly, as a typical adult male of the loggerhead species would do. So very calmly, he just started to swim and dive gradually. It was definitely one of the most memorable moments for me a case like Hermes is actually giving me strength and courage to keep doing what I’m doing. It’s obviously very challenging sometimes this job seeing animals getting hurt by by humans, especially this kind of severe head traumas that the turtles have when they’re coming in. So a case like Hermes is proof of how strong those animals are and resilient. So it gives me hope, personally, to keep carry on, and it’s something that I’ve heard from my assistants and also from many volunteers. So definitely gives us hope to carry on and get us through the difficult times when we’re having a setback in like with one of our turtle patients, for example, we always try to look on the bright side, focusing on the successes that we had. A story like the one of our miss, it could be inspiring for for everyone, for every rehabilitator, sea turtle, one or not even like if you’re rehabilitating birds or mammals, it’s always very nice to see videos of, you know, a happy ending to rehabilitation journey, at least, that’s how I feel when I see from other organisations those amazing videos of different animal species getting better and getting released.

Speaker 1 47:06
Next week, we’ll be looking at the journey seafood makes from the ocean to being served up on your plate, and we’ll be speaking to fishing communities across the UK about how super trawlers are impacting their livelihoods. Never

Dr Bryce Stewart 47:21
eat anything older than your grandmother. So that’s a species that it grows and it reproduces so slowly that it’s hard to determine what a sustainable level for that fishery would be. And you know, my opinion is we should just leave them alone. Da

Speaker 1 47:46
This episode was brought to you by Greenpeace and crowd network. It is hosted by me, wildlife filmmaker and broadcaster Hannah stitful. It is produced by Vicki Wright, Catalina Noguera, Robert Wallace, George Sampson, Kate Stevens, Steve Jones and Christina irivnak. Sound design is by Crawford Blair. The music we use is from our partners, BMG Production Music. The team at Greenpeace is James Hansen, Alex shallop, Janae Mayer, Marta of charik, Flora, havesi, Becky Malone and Alice Lloyd Hunter archive, courtesy of Greenpeace. Thanks for listening. See you next week. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai