Thursday, Nov. 1, 2018
On Thursday, an HPA team of 12 student (9 Upper and 3 Middle School students) lead by Laura Jim and Marc Rice joined Sallie Beavers and her colleagues at the National Historical Park to capture and tag honu. Our last tagging trip to KAHO occurred on April 3, 2018 during which we captured 26 turtles.
Our team arrived at 0815 h and set up for the work day. We were ready to begin capturing by 0930 after a talk by the park service about the cultural significance of the park and where we would be focusing our capture efforts.
The capturing work began immediately after the orientation and we started processing turtles shortly thereafter. The students were divided into three teams and they each took turns capturing and working up the turtles (measuring, weighing and doing the health assessment).
By lunch time (1130 h we had 19 turtles processed. Six of these were new captures and 13 were recoveries. After a lunch break we got back to work and captured an additional 21 animals. Eight of the 21 were new captures and 13 were recaptures.
Summary:
We worked up a total of 40 turtles. There were 14 new captures and 26 recaptures. Overall, the animals we captured appeared to be undernourished with a few of them receiving emaciation codes of 1 and one of them receiving EC = 3.
There were certainly a lot of turtles in the area and I suspect that we could possibly have done 60 animals if we had the energy and time!!
The wonderful folks at KAHO were well prepared and facilitated capture and moto tooling so that we could work quickly through a lot of turtles. Thanks to everyone for all of their hard work.
Aloha and have a wonderful weekend,
Below are some images of the capture and tagging work that students, park service personnel and volunteers conducted.
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| The working area at Kaloko-Honokohau National Historical Park. |
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| Sallie Beavers (National Park Service) talks about the special features and cultural significance of the Park. |
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| A small honu is captured and placed in a tube for tranport back to shore. |
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| Students help to control a honu so that measurements and health assessment can be taken. |
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| Tag numbers are read to the data recorder. |
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| Controlling the animal is essential |
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| One of our captures had metal tags from when it was first captured back in 1997 at Puako Hawaii (about 30 miles to the north of KAHO. |
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| This turtle was first captured at Puako, Hawaii in 1997. The caliper indicated its size at that time... meanng that in 21 years the poor critter had only grown about 10 cm in carapace length!!! |
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| Painting the moto tool number that was etched into the shell of each captured honu. |
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| Laura Jim with the three middle school students. |
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| Taking a honu out into the water for release. |
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| Releasing another honu. |
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| Lunch time. |
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| The HPA, NPS and Volunteers who worked all day to process 30 honu. |
