Since June 2020, the researchers have been carrying out the same monitoring in Tortuga Bay once a week, and they’ll keep doing it until the first week of December. Some rent kayaks, and two speedboats enter the bay slowly, bringing in more visitors.ĭelgado and Jacome fly the drone again, repeating their previous path, and Loyola again notes the numbers of tourists and watercraft, the weather conditions, the water temperature, and the tide height. Tourists start to arrive, most of them walking along the path that starts close to town. Three hours later, at 10 a.m., the landscape changes. The researchers have noted that the turtles are clustered at the end of the bay but they’ve also seen a group of oceanic whitetip sharks resting, close to the shore, next to the mangroves. Tide: high.Īfter 40 minutes of drone flight and a thousand photographs captured, Delgado brings the drone back down to land. Water temperature: 23º Celsius (73.4° Fahrenheit). Each one is geotagged, and every time the team comes back to Tortuga Bay, the drone repeats the same route and photographs the exact same spots.ĭown below, volunteer Alan Jacome measures the water temperature and biologist Diana Loyola writes down what she sees. The machine is programmed to take a picture every three seconds as it flies. The rest of the beach is for the iguanas basking in the sporadic rays of sunshine that burst through the thick clouds and the intermittent rain.īyron Delgado, a geographer, flies the drone to the end of the bay, 40 meters (130 feet) above the water. The sea is completely calm, a mirror where turtles rest and eat. While the study is still ongoing, the researchers have observed great differences between the numbers of turtles recorded during the time when the beach was closed and now, with tourists starting to return to the area again. It’s an easily accessible beach from the nearby town of Puerto Ayora. Image by Michelle Carrere.īecause movement restrictions prevented fieldwork in remote places where researchers would typically carry out species censuses, the researchers from the Charles Darwin Foundation, together with Galápagos National Park and funded by the National Geographic Society, decided to see what was happening at Tortuga Bay. What happened in the famed Galápagos Islands off Ecuador? Were there also more animals reclaiming the spaces here? Researchers from the Charles Darwin Foundation monitor the number of sea turtles and their locations using a drone. The question arose during the lockdown imposed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, when wild animals started roaming the empty streets of cities around the world. Their goal is to answer one question: What is the impact of tourism on the turtle populations that feed and rest here? Later, when the visitors arrive, they will do the same thing. The plan is to fly a drone over the bay to count the sea turtles that are there at this quiet time. On this cloudy morning, the only visitors to Tortuga Bay, one of the most popular beaches on the island of Santa Cruz, are three researchers from the Charles Darwin Foundation. The tide has erased the footprints from the sand, and the surface is a blank slate of white and perfectly smooth sand. It’s six in the morning and the beach is empty.
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