August 20, 2001
Tracking turtles for conservation
By Cathy Willoughby
Staff Writer
For one area teen, a summer at the seashore meant more than coming home with a tan.
Lisa Goshe, a 1999 Mohawk High School graduate and the daughter of Eugene and Sharon Goshe of Tiffin, spent 12 weeks this summer at Cape Hatteras National Seashore in North Carolina. She wasn't just soaking up the "rays'' however. Goshe was trolling the beach to watch over two endangered species, the piping plover, and sea turtles.
Goshe explained that her work there was through the Student Conservation Association
"They provide internships all over the United States, but I was interested in an area along the coast,'' Goshe said. "I also worked with sea turtles, but it was considered a piping plover endangered shore bird internship.''
Four students were assigned internships at the shore, two with the plovers and two with sea turtles. "But we got to work together a little, and I was able to go out on sea turtle patrol,'' she added.
"We would get up at 6 a.m., to be on the beaches,'' Goshe explained. "We rode on ATV's over 30 miles of beach every morning. We were looking for sea turtle crawls, which are the track marks they make when they come out of the ocean.''
If one of the students found evidence of a crawl, they were to record the location and mark off the area. That was to keep it from being disturbed by people or vehicles.
The crawls are made by the female as she goes to the beach to make a nest and deposit her eggs. From June through August, Goshe said the loggerhead sea turtle will lay eggs every two weeks. "The North Carolina coast is the northernmost point of their nesting,'' Goshe said. "They lay from 80 to 120 eggs per nest, every two weeks.''
If the student patrol saw nest marks in the sand, they would check it to see if eggs were present. If they were, a larger area would be closed off from the elements and predators for two months.
The sea turtle makes so many trips to lay eggs due to the whims of nature, such as storms and hurricanes, along the sea shore. If it looked like a nest was in danger from weather conditions, Goshe said the nest would be relocated to safer ground.
"If it is in a good area, we leave it there because mother knows best,'' Goshe explained. "On some occasions we have to move them. If they are to close to the groins, barricades which were built to stabilize the beach after the old lighthouse was moved in 1999, we move the nest. They have changed the way the sand has moved, there is always the possibility that the sand would wash the nest away. And if it is near a pier, or by a too bright light or they can be buried deeper by a collapsing sand dune.''
The eggs can't be buried too deeply, Goshe said, as the young turtles must be able to break out of the ground. "The eggs look like ping pong balls under the sand,'' she described them. "They are about one foot deep and they are soft and leathery to keep them from breaking.''
Goshe said the actual moving of a turtle egg nest was time consuming.
"You have to be very careful moving them,'' she said. "After so many hours the embryo's start attaching to the sides. So they need to be out and to the other site during an allotted time.''
The main duties Goshe had on her internship was to monitor the activity of the endangered shore bird, the piping plover. Goshe said that they were small whitish-gray birds with a black neck and head bands when they were in breeding plumage.
"They are very specific on the type of beach they will inhabit,'' she said of the birds. "North Carolina is their southernmost boundary. The Outer Banks is perfect, they prefer shelly, coarse beaches. If it's too fine of sand, they can't nest here.''
She worked out in the field, monitoring the protective breeding areas for the plovers and the chicks when they hatched. "They make a scrape in the sand, where they lay a clutch of three to four eggs,'' Goshe said. "Underneath the eggs is a layer of shells. I don't know why they do it, it may be to keep the eggs off the hot sand. Both the male and female take turns incubating the eggs. They have adapted so that the eggs blend into the sand.''
Goshe said the eggs are about the size of a robin's, and once laid, take approximately 25 days to hatch. "I had a pair where three eggs hatched,'' she said proudly.
Both species of the animals are increasingly threatened by the recreational uses of the beaches by humans. "We need to try to reach a balance with the natural resources and recreational beaches by the public,'' Goshe said. "Sometimes that's a difficult balance to achieve. Some people don't respect the closed off areas of the beaches.''
"Plovers are especially threated by increased human activity,'' she added. "Building and driving on the beach, beach use creates tire ruts that completely destroys the beach. The beach is slowly decreasing so the birds have less and less habitat.''
Currently a junior at Bowling Green State University, Goshe will be continuing her work by the sea this school year. She has been accepted as a student in the National Student Exchange Program, and will be attending the University of North Carolina in Wilmington this year. "It has a top ranked marine biology program,'' she said. "I've been studying biology with an emphasis on marine biology. Wilmington is just six miles from the Atlantic coast, they have an excellent marine science center and specialized classes I can't take anywhere else.''