Nature Seekers is aware of the potential impact of tourism activities on the Matura Beach and as a result two ongoing initiatives have been setup to monitor this impact:
1. Impact of foot traffic on hatch success
Each year over 9000 visitors come to Matura Beach to view the giant leatherback turtles. Therefore we need to monitor the effects this level of foot traffic has on the beach. To accomplish this investigation, the beach has been divided into 3 zones, with low, moderate and high use by tourists. Within each zone foot traffic is carefully controlled and quantified. To determine hatch success, a sub-sample of 100 nests in each zone will be excavated after hatchling emergence and analyzed. This data is to be compared to total foot traffic for each area. We will also test for other factors which may impact hatch success e.g. sand grain size, moisture, and temperature within each experimental area.
2. Effect of tourism on turtle behavior
One of the great challenges in evaluating how much tourist activity is permissible on a nesting beach is determining whether a turtle is being disturbed, or if that disturbance has long-term impact. Leatherbacks have a higher resistance to aborting a nesting attempt than other species, which makes the assessment of harassment levels difficult. For many species, they will simply leave the beach if disturbed. Leatherback nesting beach workers have long noticed that leatherbacks seem to change the amount of time spent on each part of the nesting process when bothered, and it has been believed that this may represent a reflection of the level of disturbance felt by the turtle. However, this has never been demonstrated in any quantified manner. Since we would like to better understand how the behavior of tourists impact (so that we can regulate proper behavior) the nesting leatherbacks at Matura we have initiated a study to determine if the timing of nesting could serve as a tool to evaluate harassment levels. If successful, we expect to use this tool to experimentally evaluate harassment thresholds, and thus institute more scientifically based ecotour management of the nesting beach.
Because nesting can be divided into distinct phases, emergence from water, approach (crawling up the beach to nest), searching/body pitting, digging, laying, covering, camouflaging, return (to sea), entering sea, the project staff will measure how long it takes a turtle to complete each phase and compare those quantified values of potentially harassing activities, including camera flashes, touches to the turtle, flashlight use, noise and number of tourists, proportion of children at each phase of nesting. |
