Sea turtle nesting season and sponsorship   |02 September 2021

Community beach planting activity

As the start of the 2021-2022 hawksbill sea turtle nesting season approaches, the Marine Conservation Society Seychelles’ (MCSS) sea turtle monitoring team looks forward to once again encountering familiar female turtles, as well as new individuals, that come to nest on Mahé’s beaches. This means an opportunity for our current turtle sponsors (or ‘adopters’) to receive updated information and new pictures of the individual they have sponsored.

Once they have reached sexual maturity, female hawksbill turtles nest every two to three years, laying multiple egg clutches within a single season. Over the years, MCSS’ sea turtle monitoring team has observed several individual turtles returning to nest on the beaches it monitors. In order to confirm the identity of the individual sea turtle, the team takes images of its facial profile and inputs them to the I3S (Interactive Individual Identification System) software, as each sea turtle has unique facial scale patterns. One particular individual, who was first encountered by our team in 2015, has been encountered every two years since – every time returning to the same beach! This has earned her the name ‘Biena’, from the word biennial. We hope to encounter her again during the upcoming nesting season and there remains the opportunity for someone to sponsor her.

There are several ways that the public can assist in MCSS’ conservation efforts under the Ridge to Reef – Temporal Protected Areas project*, including volunteering on our beach rehabilitation activities, reporting illegal activities to the Greenline and sponsoring a sea turtle. The donations received through sea turtle sponsorships provide critical financial assistance, which facilitates ongoing research activities, including the monitoring of important sea turtle nesting beaches. This long-term monitoring programme would not have been possible without the financial support of the public. All donations and contributions really do make a difference.

For more information on how you can sponsor a sea turtle or make a donation to MCSS’ ongoing research and conservation activities, visit our website www.mcss.sc or use the link https://www.mcss.sc/turtle_adoption.html for more information.

*The Temporal Protected Areas Project is funded under the GOS-GEF-UNDP project entitled ‘A Ridge to Reef Approach for the Integrated Management of Marine, Coastal and Terrestrial Ecosystems in the Seychelles’ (Ridge to Reef Project). The project’s objective is to manage and conserve the flow of marine, coastal and terrestrial ecosystem services in targeted islands of the Seychelles for multiple benefits through the Ridge-to-Reef approach.

Contributed by MCSS