Management Research Needs 



Research on Sea Turtles in the Water Needed for 

 Management (Nancy B. Thompson) 



Introduction 



The needs of a manager to manage completely any resource 

 are: (1) the bounds of the unit stock; (2) whether each stock 

 is increasing, decreasing or stable over time; and (3) what is 

 causing any trend or change in abundance. Only with this 

 information can prudent management plans be developed. Various 

 sampling methods applied to collect information on turtles in the 

 water provide information which address each of the three 

 identified management needs. 



Turtles are unique aquatic organisms, because they all spend 

 at least a very brief period of time on land. Hpwever, except 

 for adult females, the vast majority of turtles never venture 

 onto land, at least on their own. Studies on turtles in the 

 water can be labor intensive or expensive relative to research 

 which focuses on the beaches. The objective of this paper is to 

 review the types of survey methods that have been and are used to 

 study turtles in the water and determine how applicable this 

 information is to the three defined management needs. 



Sampling Programs 



Two general approaches are available to collect data on 

 turtles in the water and these are via remote and proximal 

 sensing. Remote sensing includes aerial surveys, radio and 

 satellite tracking, while proximal sensing includes vessel 

 surveys and observations. 



Aerial surveys remote sensing ; Aerial surveys are useful 

 for censusing turtles over a large area. In the U.S., both 

 loggerhead and leatherback turtles are easily visible from the 

 air. The National Marine Fisheries Service, Southeast Fisheries 

 Center (NMFS/SEFC) has supported pelagic surveys from North 

 Carolina to Texas waters targeting both marine turtles and 

 mammals. Surveys were conducted along the Atlantic coast on a 

 seasonal basis from 1982 to 1984 (Figure 1) . These surveys, 

 called SETS for Southeast Turtle Surveys, were completed from 

 North Carolina to Key West, Florida in a twin engine Beechcraft 

 AT-11 (Figure 2) . This aircraft is equipped with a glass and 

 plexiglass bubble nose observation platform that can accommodate 

 two people who have an unobstructed view of the flight trackline 

 out to the horizon. Flying at an altitude of 500 ft optimizes 

 the sightability of turtles. The study area was divided into 10 

 sampling units each of which could be flown in one day (Figure 

 1) . Thus, ten flight days were necessary to complete one 

 seasonal survey. Weather always becomes a factor and in this 



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