Turtle released with tracking transmitter in Playa Espíritu

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The longest-tracked turtle reached Ecuador

Escuinapa, Sinaloa.- Since 2014, 13 olive ridley turtles have been tagged with satellite trackers, in the Tortuguero camp of Playa Espíritu, being in 2018 the last to be released with a device.

Turtles

It is the Aurelia turtle, 45 kilograms, who, after having laid her eggs in Playa Espíritu, decided to place a tracker on it to locate its route to the open sea.

Raquel Briseño Dueñas, technical responsible for compliance with the Fonatur UNAM program for environmental compliance, commented that it was a turtle named Tetatzin that was released in November 2019 that has traveled the longest stretch, from Playa Espíritu to Ecuador, and was he lost track only on October 9.

“During 343 days he had a route between all the turns that he made approximately 13 thousand 583 kilometers,” he explained.

The satellite telemetry project consists of marking olive ridley turtles, and this year there have been two transmitters, at a cost of 90 thousand pesos, models K2G 376E, which have wet-dry sensors that activate transmissions when the turtles are on the surfaces from the water, where locations are accurate to within 150 meters and up to 1,000 meters.

“The satellite receives the signal and from there it is passed to a data center that is doing an analysis of where the turtle is located, and it is exported; we have a contract number, and through there we can receive the location of where the turtle is during the battery life ”, he explained.

Raquel Briseño commented that the battery life can be variable, since this will depend on the number of times the tortoise is being turned on and off for the time that the turtle lasts on the surface.

He said that since 2012 work has been done and 520 thousand 973 offspring have been contributed to the wild population, which has allowed a recovery of the turtle population along with the other camps.

“The intention is to sensitize the population of the importance of conserving natural resources, habitats and species, not only to take care of the health of ecosystems and fauna, but to take care of human health since it is proven that it has repercussions” , he indicated.

Source: reaccioninformativa.com

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