SEATRU

had a pleasant experience in the SEATRU (Sea Turtle Rearch Unit) programme which is based at Chagar Hutang of Redang Island.

my slot is from 9th to 16th July 2011 comprising of:

• 8 volunteers - from different states and also countries and 6 of us are UMT students^^
• 1 research assistant - Yana is her name
• 2 FYP students and
• 3 staffs - Adie, Mann and Mizi.

during this programme, the volunteers which are paired up into two need to prepare breakfast while lunch and dinner is done by the staffs.

in the morning, we have to patrol the beach to check if the nest is attacked by monitor lizard or crab holes. not forgetting to measure the nest - kinda hard to explain bout this thing^^

after lunch, we had activities like beach cleanup, river hiking, prawn spa, rock hiking, round island, snorkelling and also gotong royong.

river hiking - view

prawn spa

turtle rock - view

before dinner, we went for nest checking and removed eggs that have been attacked by monitor lizards, ants, crabs or even fungus.

towards the night, we gathered up at the beach and patrol to see if there's any turtle landing by looking at the turtle tracks..we even mistaken rocks for turtles.lol!~

the earliest the turtle that arrived during my slot is around 8pm and the latest is around 6pm or so.

most of the turtles landed are green turtle.

we thought we will never come across hawksbill turtle..but she did come up to nest around 6pm when we are nest checking..

so lucky!^^

turtle eggs

me posing with hawksbill

me posing with green turtle

get to see lots of stars in the night when the moon is no where to be seen for the first few days.

but towards the end of our slot..strong wind and heavy rain came - which means no turtle landing to nest.

our slot broke the current record of turtle nesting by 1 which makes it 24 nesting..^^