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National Geographic : 1973 Oct
Contents
especially if the sand is either too wet or too dry," he said. He scissored open an egg, re vealing a dead embryo. Ugly blue-green streaks showed that its tissues had been attacked by insidious microorganisms. Willy collected a number of infected eggs for analy sis in the university laboratory. We still had not witnessed an arribada, but a few turtles came ashore each night, keeping the biologists busy. Undergraduate Bill Stewart had been assigned to aid the Peace Corps people. In the dark he and his associate Oliver Daniren stalked the beach with scales and oversize calipers. Object: to measure the precise length, breadth, and weight of the egg-laying turtles. They also re corded the sizes and numbers of eggs the turtles deposited. "That's only one of our procedures," Doug said. "We want to learn more about ridley movements too, so we've started tagging." Turtle tagging also takes place about 50 miles up the coast at Nancite, another site of the phenomenal ridley arribadas. In 1971 Dr. David A. Hughes, working there under a Turtle-man of Ostional, biologist Dr. Douglas Robinson (below) rights a female he found upside down. Assistant Bill Stewart (right) weighs eggs to correlate their size with that of the mother. Peace Corps Volunteer Dan McDuffie (lower right) fixes a metal tag to a front flipper. Tagging may help answer such questions as where ridleys go after egg laying and how often they nest. research grant from the National Geographic Society, wrote: "I estimate, I think conserva tively, that no fewer than 120,000 nested over a four-day period. The experience of being among such a horde of clumsy, heaving, panting, digging creatures on a dark night is almost indescribable. Vast arrays of them nest shoulder-to-shoulder in the crush, and are continually crawling over each other." Later one night on Ostional Beach I watched Dan McDuffie tag a big ridley on her nest. With one knee firmly planted on the broad, rock-hard carapace, he clamped a conspicuous metal tag onto a front flipper with heavy pliers (bottom). She lay stonily indifferent, as if in a trance. I swept my flashlight beam over her head, from which mournful eyes gazed transfixed, then rearward. Her tail sloped into a foot deep hole she had dug with her two back flippers, acting almost like hands. As I watched, her neck tautened and she began to strain. Her mouth gaped as if to shriek, but there was no sound except that of dropping eggs and perhaps the suggestion 578
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