The National Marine Park of Zakynthos

I must admit it, my work for my beloved turtles are not the hardest in the world. We are along a stretch of beaches that are not among the heaviest populated turtle beaches. There are other people that are are doing an enourmous effort for the loggerhead, or other turtle species, in other parts of the world. Or in other parts of Greece. If we move our attention to the Island of Zakynthos, everyday life is totally different.

Below is a map of the protected area that is The National Marine Park of Zakynthos. The park was established in 1999, and has several different aimes. One of the most important are the protection of the breeding grounds for the Caretta. Other reasons are the protection of the monk seal, protect avifauna and especially migrating birds, and coastal and marine habitats.

The national marine park is on the south side of the Island and is located along the bay of Laganas. The bay is suggested to become a Natura 2000 site.

As I said one of the main goals for creating this park was to protect the nesting of the loggerhead, and the area is the breeding grounds in Greece, and then europe, wich ha the largest population. Each year between 857 and  2,018 nests are to be found. Even if there are several distinct areas within the park the turtles are nesting, the beach Sekania is the most important totalling about 5 km in length, of which Sekania is rated amongst the world’s highest loggerhead nesting concentrations in the whole world

So as you see there are much work to do for those that are volunteers in Zakynthos. But I'm sure there are loads of fun also and some really cool challenges. Maybe I must go there next year. Any way, here is a link for those of you wanting to become a volunteer at the park; Volunteering at The National Marine Park of Zakynthos.

Good luck

Finally

yesterdays news from Crete; the first nest has been found; Yioupi, hurray, hurra

Just a short update.

Wow, has it alrerady been four days since the last time? Time flies so fast, and I have been writing a lot on my other blogs these days. I have to recommend them also;

http://watericeandsnow.blogspot.com/
http://arcticview.blogspot.com/
http://extinctandendangeredbirds.blogspot.com/

So far this season there has been only few news from the volunteers in Crete and I got no news since the last time I was writing.

Hope I'll be getting back with more news in one of the next days. But it's also weekend and weekends are the best time for writing. See you soon:-)

Rafetus swinhoei

Everyday I get loads of news about turtles from around the world, some of them are funny, some are interesting, some I don't even bother about, some worries me and some are truly negative to get. The IUCN has a species of the day. As you surely understand it changes every day and since it was yesterdays animal ( what could it be on world Turtle Day?, hm.. )  I wanted to show you, you better se here; http://www.iucnredlist.org/sotdfiles/rafetus-swinhoei.pdf. This is seen upon as the most endangered of all the turtles in the world. Not a big surprise if you know it's only four known individuals left of this species.

Even if it's only four of these animals left, conservationists have not given up. They have placed two of them together in a Zoo, and they have teamed up together, laid eggs. But so far no hatchlings has been produced.  One of the people working on this project is the prominent herpetologist ( a person working with both reptiles and amphibians ) Gerald Kuchling, said that the pairing was a success, so we still must wait in hope for a breeding with hatchlings.

The Rafetus swinhoei, also known as Shanghai soft-shell turtle, Yangtze giant soft-shell turtle, is as the name says, a turtle with a soft shell. And they are really soft sheeled, it's more like a extra thick layer of skin. That leaves them more vulnerable for praying or for being injured from rocks. There are many soft shell turtles around the world and they are found in waterways in almost all the continents. The Rafetus swinhoei area of living has been the Red River of Yunnan and Vietnam, and the lower Yangtze floodplain.

What's the reason then for the turtles to become so close to extinction? The turtles have been used as food and their body, like skull and carapace has been used as medicine or as trophees. Furthermore they are the victims of habitat loss. The more or less only ways to help this turtle is to work more to get the captivated turtles to breed with success and search for other unknown animals in the free.

while we do our effort to help the loggerhead from coming in the same situation, lets give our thought and symbolic help to all those striving for the best of the Rafetus swinhoei

World turtle day

Today it's the world turtle day, a day was started to increase the respect and the knowledge of the turtles. It was started by the organisation American tortoise rescue . It's a non-profit organisation wich aim is to work for the protection of all species of turtles and tortoises. The day was started ten years ago and is slowly getting more and more celebrated.
Here I will link you up to some different webpages that will tell you more about the celebration and what is happening around the world, or has happened already. Since all I find comes from the net, there will off course be a lot lot more of ways to celebrate the day. I will also mention webpages or blogs that also talk about the celebration of the turtles.

First I will mention the organisation that I shall work for this summer, Archelon. When I search the webpages of theirs I find a logo for the day, but nothing about what's gonna happen. To bad, really to bad. I still hope and also think they are doing something. As I also now the turtle nesting season is on it's way, I'm not sure if they have the capacity to celebrate it all over. The daily work for the turtle protection is indeed more important.

The sea turtle restoration project has focused on two ways to celebrate the day. They organise a beach clean up at San Francisco and they also focus on the plastic bags that are so much of a danger for the turtles. So they arrange a make your own re-useable shopping bag.

 

In australia several enviromental organisations has joined their forces in an attempt to focus on the flatback turtle. Around the country they try to make people make sand versions of turtles. Then take a picture of it and send it to enviromental turtle. The wilderness society is one of the organisations participating in this attempt.

Even if it already have started during the winter,  the Emirates Wildlife Society-WWF have started a turtle-tracking project as part of the world turtle day. The project is a cooperation between the Emirates and 4 other countries in that area; Oman Quatar, Saudi-Arabia and Iran. The main-species of the project is the critically endangered Hawksbill turtle. Read more about it here; golfturtles.com

I was disappointed during my search for the celebration of the "World turtle day", the three above-mentioned activities were all that I found. But the day is mentioned in many places and some have done it really well. the Human Society of the USA have listed twelve things that we can do for the turtles and the tortoises. They have also made an article about the celebration.

A blog that's celebrating the "world turtle day" is MINTdegradable. In the blog she is also telling about her personal experiences with the magnificent turtles and what we can do to help them. She's also using it as some kind of advertisement as she says she's working for a company that has made some plastic that's degradeable.

What most worried me when I was searching the net for is that there are also many petfriendly pages with turtepets that talks about the "World Turtle Day". I don't like it. I want all the trade with turtles forbidden. There are enough problems for the turtles and tortoises so we don't need them as pets.

Anyway, go out, enjoy the "World Turtle Day"

The blue flag system

It has been a few days since I last was here to write my carefully chosen words full of spelling mistakes for you. Today I found a little about the beaches in Crete and if they were certified to be a blue flag or not. It's the organisation FEE thas is responsible for this certification. FEE is an organisation that's "aiming to promote sustainable development through environmental education". One of the things they are responsible for is to certifie beaches along the world via the blue flag. The blue flag certification is a eco-label that beaches or marinas can apply for. It's spreading more and more out around the world and now the blue flag certification can be found in Europe, South Africa, Morocco, Tunisia, New Zealand, Brazil, Canada and the Caribbean . As you can see large parts of the world are still not taking part of the blue flag system, but as the system gets more and more known I'm sure it will grow. So far there are just three beaches in Norway that has been found good enough to get a blue flag.

What are the Criteria to become a "blue flag"-beach? There are many many of them, so I will just pick a few to display here;
- Information about "blue flag", and a list of the criteria to get the blue flag
- Information about the water quality, and also fulfill the criteria made for this.
- Having enviromental activities, like  improve the consciousness of visitors and residents in the area about the
   local enviroment.
- Enviromental information; about the ecosystem in the neighbourhood, and information about protected or
   vulnerable nature areas in nearby sorroundings. It also includes information about protected or vulnerable birds, reptiles, fishes, plants and other living creatures.
- A map of the area, displaying toilets, protected areas, phones, water quality measurement areas, parking,
  "you are here"-marking and a lot of other things.
- Rules for the area, like opening-hours, driving, camping and animals.

In Crete, or to be more spesific, in our area along the coast of Platanias, the main beaches that we survey are all included in the blue flag system, both the Platanias, the Gerani and the Maleme beach.

I can't help wondering, do they really deserve the blue flag? When I think about the information that I have seen along those beaches, much information has been lacking or not present at all. Ok. I didn't go along the beaches looking for it, so maybe I'm to quick to judge. And maybe I need to go along the beaches this year to search for all the things they need to fulfill to be a part of the blue flag system.

The greeks have a term; fakelaki. This means " little envelope". It's a common way of bribery troughout the whole country. Could it be that it also could happen when it comes to the "blue flag"-certification, only with bigger envelopes?. I hope my suspiscion will be proven wrong.

Happy turtle news

While I almost all the time feel tat I get bad news about the turtles, there are some surprises. And what kind of surprises, because I was not even looking for news about turtles, I was checking a birding community from Birdlife International. On the page it was a map with some news from around the worls. Curious as I am, I had to see what it was. One was the news about some work for one of the most endangered warblers ( birds,, what a shock ), the next I was looking at was; yeah, good news about a turtle, The numbers of nesting hawkbills turtles has increased. It is now considered to be eight times as high as it was in the early seventies.

So it's really true conservation works, at least some places. The hawkbill turtle is one of the turtles where it has been a large international trade. The trade has been for it's raw shell and the meat. Later there has been a ban on this international trade. Even if this hazard have been minimized there are many other hazards; bycatch from the fishing industries is one of them. Destruction of their nesting habitats is another. Even this, the population in the reserve has inclined with really good numbers.

 The hawksbill  is regarded by the IUCN redlist as crically endangered and the world population has decreased with 80% during the last three turtlebill turtle generation. So even though the population are increasing in some protected area this was reall not so good news in the end :-(