Sea Turtle Stories – Episode 1

Martin has had a long and illustrious history of working with reptiles which goes back all the way to his school days. From the age of eight he was taking care of injured and abused reptiles in a specially designed reptile house in his parents’ backyard. By the age of 12, Martin was writing articles in international herpetological magazines. During university studies in biological sciences, Martin discovered his love for diving and marine biology which has taken him all over the world, from places like Hawaii, Mexico to the Philippines and the Maldives.

Martin has worked on a variety of different projects such as the study of thresher sharks all the way to things like coral propagation. Over the course of his many adventures Martin was always acutely aware of the negative impacts that humans were having on the world’s ecosystems. Eventually this realisation and his passion for change translated to the founding of the Olive Ridley Project in 2013, which came about in response to the alarming numbers of Olive Ridley sea turtles that he was finding entangled in discarded fish gear in the Maldives.

So welcome Martin we are so glad to have you here today to talk about our shared passion for sea turtles and to get us going with this podcast series.

Dr Martin Stelfox : Thanks Minnie, thanks for the introduction and it’s great to be here.

Minnie: So let’s begin sort of with why sea turtles? Why is this something that you’re really passionate about and what is so special about sea turtles to you?

Martin: Yeah so I think it’s a good question. Well first and foremost I find sea turtles absolutely fascinating as I’m sure many of our listeners do as well and if you’ve ever had the immense privilege of snorkelling or diving with sea turtles that first experience kind of stays with you for a lifetime.

My experience many years ago left me with many questions about their daily lives, behaviour, just generally what they do on a day-to-day basis and what I found is when you start digging through the literature you begin to realise that sea turtles play a super important part for a healthy ecosystem. You know species such as the leatherback sea turtle control jellyfish blooms, you’ve got  species that graze all day long on fast-growing organisms such as sponges which allows for the slower growing very important coral species so it allows for species diversification on coral reefs, and then we have those that simply graze all day long in seagrass meadows keeping everything in check and ultimately protecting a very important habitat for many young and juvenile species and then of course the importance of sea turtles on your environment is very well documented but there’s also cultural and socio-economic value of sea turtles, and whether it be through living with sea turtles side by side through many generations or relying on sea turtles for economic growth and in some cases even sustenance as well.

I think another interesting area that makes sea turtles are special to me is they’ve got a very complex evolutionary history and we’re still kind of developing theories today and I love it when scientific findings forces the community to take a step back and go oh that’s new information I didn’t know that and it completely changes everything we once thought we knew about a particular species and sea turtles are a great example of that.

Minnie: I used to love to tell people how sea turtles survived the mass extinction event that killed the dinosaurs but actually they’re even older I think than that. Like how long have we had sea turtles on the planet?

Martin: Well and that’s right they are and it’s not just one mass extinction you know we’re going back to the ancestors we’re looking at three mass extinctions that they survived and it’s pretty insane but yeah I mean to answer that question you have to kind of go back about 260 million years ago you know in the Permian period the earliest known ancestor of modern turtles existed which was a basically like a land-based reptile with elongated ribs but they didn’t have any developed shell and it was known as a eunotosaurus, and then 60 million years later so around 220 million years ago so this is now the Jurassic period it gave rise to a toothed turtle called Odontochelys and this was the first species to venture into the marine world. Again an important evolutionary history since you know this particular species was found with expanding ribs that were precursors to a fully formed shell so this starts to suggest that the formation of the ribs came before the formation of the shell. And so before this discovery of this particular species in the fossil record, it was basically unknown if the shell or the ribs came first, and that came to light about 2008 or around that time.

Minnie: Well fairly recent actually yeah

Martin: Yeah and then and then you know the fully formed shell didn’t really appear for another 10 million years later in the fossil record with turtle species Proganochelys and that was the first species that was exclusively living in a marine environment and then had a shell or something that we could resemble the shell of the modern day, and then fast forward a whole heap of evolutionary history, the earliest ancestor that looked most like modern day sea turtles appeared about 120 million years ago, this was again moving out of the Jurassic now into the Cretaceous period and interestingly these species of sea turtle laid hard-shelled eggs as opposed to the soft-shelled eggs that we kind of know very well today. And then comes as you mentioned the mass extinctions event, so the biggest one that happened about 66 million years ago wiped out about 50 percent of plants and animals.

Minnie: But not these guys

Martin: Yeah, sea turtles they managed to survive, yeah I mean it’s crazy and they continue to evolve and and you know of course despite sea turtles and their ancestors surviving these three major extinctions, some people argue that we’re on the cusp of a sixth mass extinction. Now that could be through the use of nuclear weapons, the whole politics situation, could be our impact on the surrounding environment. But indeed if there is a sixth mass extinction, whatever form that may take it could be the greatest challenge in the evolutionary history of sea turtles that they could ever face and I think that that is quite scary.

Minnie: Yeah, I think that kind of leads on to what I was going to say which is that they’ve been around for such an incredible amount of time and they have persisted and and in fact thrived in these environments for so many hundreds of millions of years but we’re seeing a significant stressor on their entire population, specifically from anthropogenic threats specifically from humans and I think that’s probably where a lot of your research comes in right? Would you like to tell us a little bit more about what kind of led you to establishing the olive ridley project?

Martin: Yeah well I was working as a biologist in the Maldives and I was witnessing a lot of sea turtles entangled in fishing gear. That was what spurred me to kind of birth I guess the olive ridley project because we were focused on this one particular threat and it was the threat of plastic pollution in the form of fishing gear and I think at the time uh when you’re when you’re witnessing these kind of events unfold, it it really pulls on our heartstrings and I think that, it was that that kind of spurred on the kind of motivation I guess to get something developed. It started with me and a couple of other biologists just brainstorming ideas and then we built a facebook page and noticed that everybody else was sort of seeing the exact same things. This has been happening for a long time you know as long as fishing kind of been around really, but the problem now is most of the fishing gear that we find today is synthetic, it’s not natural um so of course the problem is a bit more insidious I guess and and a lot more transboundary as well, um because plastic is able to float for a long time so that entanglement hazard persists for a long time yeah.

Minnie: So anyone I suppose who um follows the work of the olive ridley project will probably see this quite a lot obviously in in the form of our Rescue Centre, so um where i spent a good couple of years of my life also seeing this on a daily basis um, but particularly yeah these these entanglement threats would be responsible for untold numbers of deaths and I assume we don’t really have many good figures on on how prevalent actually the loss of sea turtle life and other species life is through through just being entangled in these fish nets. Do we have any kind of understanding of the scale of the problem?

Martin: Well yes and no. We’ve got an idea of the scale of the issue of how much gear potentially could be in the oceans at any given time. I think it’s starting with around 10% of marine plastic in general which is around 640,000 tons every year of gear in the ocean at any given time. But this number got quickly debunked because it was a very old figure based on very old numbers um so now we kind of go how long of nets have we got in the ocean and how many hooks and and how many traps and pots are we losing, so it’s all about numbers and to be honest with you it would be it would be irresponsible of me to give you a a figure, because we just don’t know. But it’s a very big number and unfortunately like I say that the biggest problem, is that the majority of fishing gear is made of synthetics and it’s just how long this gear stays around, so it’s accumulating. So even when you lose the gear it stays in the system for a long time and it just accumulates and accumulates, basically choking the system so to speak. So yeah a little bit apprehensive to give you an exact figure but it’s a lot.

Minnie: Sure, and I mean would you say then that represents kind of one of the biggest threats that sea turtles face now or do we have, also, other equally as concerning threats to their survival?

Martin: Do you know what I get that question like all the time, like is ghost gear the biggest threat to sea turtles um it’s really hard to say and and most of the time it’s region specific. So for example, um the olive ridley’s we find in the Maldives, um they’re coming from two major populations, they’re coming from the east coast of India and they’re coming from the Sri Lankan population. Now the issue of ghost gear you could argue is not necessarily having a major impact on the population level to the east coast because you’re dealing with 200000 plus females, they’re a big big population. But the Sri lankan population is much much more though, we’re dealing with around 750 females, nesting females so it’s a tiny portion of the population, it is genetically distinct as well it’s its own management unit. And so you could argue that it is having an impact at the population level so it completely depends on which region you’re talking about and also which species as well. But globally I would hesitate to say that ghost gear is or isn’t the biggest threat to sea turtles, there are other very well-documented threats like bycatch as we know, the impact of changing environment for example, loss of habitats that comes with that, but what we can’t say is that ghost gear isn’t the biggest problem, because there’s just not enough information out there to say that with any concrete evidence.

But I guess that the evidence that’s out there at the moment would suggest that certainly there’s other issues out there that are more pressing to sea turtles than ghost gear.

Minnie: Like you said there’s quite a lot of variation across the world as to what will actually represent the threat of most significance to that particular population and that’s probably quite a good segway into some of the other things that the olive ridley project does. So could you tell us a little bit about I guess some of the threats that we’re sort of seeing in some of our other areas that we’re also researching and how things are being sort of mitigated ?

Martin: Yeah and i think that’s a good point actually I think a lot of people think the Olive Ridley Project is all about one species, the olive ridley and it’s all about ghost gear and and certainly in the early days that’s what it was about it was about just one particular species and the single threat that we were looking at. And but as you say we take a more holistic approach to sea turtle conservation, so we’re exploring research and conservation ideas amongst many different species, so not just the olive ridley. And there’s lots of different threats, unfortunately, that sea turtles face, for example, in Kenya we see things like Fibropapillomatosis which is a big problem over in Kenya yet in the Maldives we don’t typically see that. So it does really vary from place to place. Bycatch isn’t such a big issue in the Maldives because the majority of fishing is pole and line, whereas in Kenya you’ve got issues with gillnets and the same in all the other areas that we work in actually that do use nets, bycatch will become a big problem. So we take a multi-faceted approach to conserving sea turtles. We do this through rescue and conservation medicine, we used to kind of coin it rescue and rehabilitation but the rehabilitation side of it would suggest that anybody can do rehabilitation. And that’s right you potentially could. Conservation medicine however takes it that step further and involves a bit of research behind what it is we’re doing, so that we can help more sea turtles, not just the ones that we’re directly uh handling at the time. So we’re involved in rescue and conservation medicine, scientific research and our scientific research is quite varied from like I say looking at the issue of Fibropapillomatosis right away through to social economic surveys so it’s quite varied, and everything in between and then there’s also the education outreach component, working at the community level but also working with governments and assisting on various different projects and ideas and brainstorming in that capacity as well.

Minnie: Yeah I talk about this quite a lot I suppose because I was very much in the rescue and conservation kind of medicine sector, and so um it’s interesting whichever kind of division you’re working in you’ll see different things. So yes in the Maldives we obviously saw a lot of entanglement whereas if you did this and you were working in for example like the USA you’d see a lot of things like boat strikes, so turtles getting hit by boats, uh because of the boat traffic in that area or you’d see a lot of fishing hook line entanglements whereas if you go somewhere else like Oman there’s quite a lot of bycatch of these turtles being caught. Or things in Kenya like fibropapilloma which is a virus, for anyone who’s not heard of that. It’s a really nasty kind of tumour growing virus that we see on sea turtles that can actually end up covering their entire body and it can grow internally as well and can actually kill them that way. And research is still ongoing on that one isn’t it, but we do understand a bit more about some of the transmission and they do think it’s pollution based potentially there are quite a lot of factors involved. So, we still do believe there’s an anthropogenic component to that virus, so a lot of concerns and a lot of different ways unfortunately in which humans are impacting the survival of sea turtles. So it seems that research is quite central to ORP’s work.

Is there something that you find particularly interesting from the research that we’ve done that you’d like to share with listeners, something that people might not be very aware of when it comes to sea turtles?

Martin: Well I mean there’s so much that we can talk about but I guess one particular area that excites me is the use of AI actually leveraging technology to potentially identify unhealthy sea turtles, which sounds a bit sci-fi and a bit futuristic but it’s something we’re actually working on at the moment.

So what I mean by that is, leveraging technology to identify behavioural or specific aetiological I guess precursors that can quickly and accurately alert a veterinary surgeon of up-and-coming health conditions. And so therefore, if you could identify a certain behaviour, maybe a certain eye movement or a certain tell or a tick using AI to identify that. If we can catch it early before it actually manifests then we can avoid health conditions altogether, so we’re in the early stages of that research and we’re really excited to see where that could potentially lead, and the implications of it are quite massive. So I’d say that’s something that I’m quite excited about at the moment.

AD: You are listening to Sea Turtle Stories, a podcast about all things sea turtles, brought to you by the Olive Ridley Project.

Minnie: That is very exciting. There’s quite a few ways in which it’s certainly veterinary medicine which is my field tends to be a little bit unfortunately further behind due to things like funding and kind of research availability. And so AI obviously is quite used already in a lot of human medicine ways, because they can standardise things and they can use algorithms, and we do in veterinary medicine now have you a sort of AI assessment of things like x-rays. So AI can look at an x-ray, it can identify things that well-trained humans may miss or may not be able to see in their early stages, so it’s kind of a little bit like that which I think, is yeah really really interesting.

Martin: What people may not realise is in a rescue kind of environment the work of the veterinary surgeon is almost non-stop, it’s like continuous. We’ve got a facility that can maybe house like comfortably eight let’s say yeah. But right now we’ve got like 13-14 patients so you can imagine the amount of work that’s involved in that. And things like the way we treat buoyancy problems. I’m not going to go into that too much, the treatment side of it, but buoyancy issues are a big problem for us because you know, we treat sea turtles and they sit on the top of the water, essentially very buoyant and of course sea turtles need to be underwater to feed. So we can’t release them at that point, we’ve got to wait for the buoyancy issue to overcome. But we’ve changed our methods somewhat, but that method is very human resource heavy it’s a lot of human analysis and constant monitoring, and it takes a lot of time so imagine if we can use AI to remove that time consumption and that research, so they can focus on possibly charging more sea turtles that can be released faster. And so yeah like I said the implications of AI are quite extraordinary and they’re already being used, you know and like you say x-ray images and various other things. So we’re going to see if we can maybe use it in a different way because as you know Minnie you know you’ve spent hours staring at sea turtles I’m sure, of patients.

Minnie: Days

Martin: But you know each one’s got a character right, every sea turtle’s got a character, they’re very unique. No two sea turtles are the same and seemingly a sea turtle that looks otherwise non-responsive, suddenly within the next hour is full of energy and full of life and you know, why is that? Is there a certain tell that could give us a little bit more information of what’s going on?

Minnie: Yeah

Martin: And yes that’s why I think it’s an important and a very interesting area  of research, but one we’ve got to be careful with because you just don’t know where it will lead.

Minnie: It’s interesting because yeah it’s a huge privilege as the veterinary surgeon there, to be spending every single day with a particular set of patients but, like you say there is a time limitation and you’re doing you’re looking at everyone, you’re observing everyone daily, you’re examining everyone daily, but there can be things that you may not see. And I remember, in one case actually a turtle who I noticed perhaps a little bit a few days late that wasn’t swimming quite the same way. And I was very angry at myself because I hadn’t noticed it before, that he wasn’t using his flipper quite as he had done before and I think if there was an AI capacity to watch these turtles daily like we do, but they’re obviously picking up things that we’re not picking up. You probably notice these kind of very subtle changes in their movement very early and pick up things that we struggle with for example like absolutely minute sort of flipper movement changes that would allow us to get on top of that even faster than we already do.

Martin: Yeah and the great thing about because because we’ve got cameras that are managing our sea turtles 24×7 and there’s algorithms working behind the scenes 24×7, so it’s a constant it doesn’t have, to turn off doesn’t need a break it’s continuously, 365 days of the year um just monitor and analyse and crunch data. And that’s what we’re leveraging, that’s hopefully something we’re going to see in the future that’s super interesting.

Minnie: As a person who used to stand and watch the CCTV even when I wasn’t there I think it’d be much more helpful if it was a computer. That’s really interesting and I look forward to seeing that research as well.

I found something particularly interesting about your research into entanglements specifically in olive ridley’s, was about sort of the life stages of turtles that were sort of at the highest risk of entanglement. So I was going to sort of ask you if you can kind of talk a little bit about why is it such a threat and specifically to which life stage ?

Martin: Yeah and again another good question, because it’s a question that kind of surfaces more questions.

Minnie: Yeah yeah all questions beget more questions here.

Martin: But yeah you’re quite right, most of the um entanglements we find in the Maldives actually are juveniles or young adults, and they’re females, we get very few males actually entangled. And this seems to be a bit of a common theme for a lot of conservationists working in different areas of the world. The most likely kind of reason for this is juveniles spend quite a lot of time drifting, moving with the currents and being a bit more pelagic and this kind of exposes them to a lot more hazards. One of those hazards being drifting ghost gears so that’s probably why juveniles are particularly more at risk than any other life stage if you like.

Why females more so than males, again that’s a good question, um difficult to say but males typically don’t really come out of the water. There’s occasions where a male will come out  to bask on something that’s floating or may come onto a beach to bask, these observations have been made very very rarely though when you compare them to females. Females are obviously moving between nesting and foraging sites, uh they’re also coming onto beaches when they’re about to lay their eggs, so they do come on land when needed. So I guess it’s that movement between different habitats that probably exposes females more so than males. Males typically spend most of their lives, in all of their lives pretty much in the water. Olive ridley’s are a particularly pelagic species so they’re in pretty deep deep seas and they can forage pretty deep also. And I guess yeah like I say as to females that that movement between habitats that exposes them and increases their risk of entanglement. That is the best kind of yes I guess uh into why that might be.

Minnie: I mean my understanding is that primarily they’re travelling these massive distances in order to mate I guess. It’s known that a lot of turtles will have their foraging ground, so where they’re eating being sometimes the other end of the world to where they’re actually then going to mate and to lay their eggs. And both the males and the females will migrate to these areas in order to then kind of mate in offshore areas, and then the females obviously will come ashore but the males will stay back. But I guess while they’re migrating these massive distances in order to meet up, this puts them at huge risk of things at every different stage in that migration. A loggerhead will migrate between like Baja California and Japan I think. It’s incredible that they will travel that far.

Martin: It is, it is!

Minnie: But of course in that huge distance there is a lot of threats that they could come across. And maybe I could just ask you quickly about mating, so we don’t really know very much about mating in sea turtles. I guess we don’t see it very often but it is quite relevant for I think particularly for things like ghost gear and pelagic like you’ve said so offshore or deep water open ocean threats, it’s quite relevant because this is where these guys are sort of meeting up. Can we talk a little bit about how that works for them?

Martin: Yeah it’s like it’s quite a rare sight for humans to see and, I don’t know if you’ve seen it Minnie.

Minnie: Sadly not!

Martin: In my career I’ve only seen it once and it was very fleeting. It was just a male kind of approaching a female and the female wasn’t interested and disappeared. So that you know is quite a rare sight, but it essentially starts with the male approaching the female, and then the male will generally bite on her neck and flipper, trying to get her attention and if she doesn’t kind of, if she’s not as interested, she’d obviously flee but if she is interested she’d kind of hang around. And then what happens then is the male then begins to climb on top of the shell and position himself so that his tail goes under the the back of the shell of the female and the tail is where the reproductive organs are actually located. And in fact this is how you identify a male compared to a female, the males have a longer tail when compared to a female. And he’s able to hold on to the female with extremely sharp claws on his front flippers, and as you can imagine you know this is very exhausting for the female as she needs to hold the weight of both herself and the male that holds on onto her back. And often there’s multiple males trying to get the attention of the female at the same time, so these males start approaching that situation, that courting situation and they start trying to bite the male, and try and remove him off the back of the female. So it’s an extra layer of burden to the female, so it’s very exhausting and unfortunately and quite sadly, we sometimes see females drown in the process because it’s just so overwhelming, and there’s so much activity going on.

The interesting thing about this is the males typically then saunter away if you like, and they don’t really do anything. But the females then migrate back to their nesting areas and we have learned that females are actually able to store sperm as well which is quite interesting. The genetics of nests have actually shown multiple parental origins within that nest which is quite interesting and something that’s quite unique to sea turtles. And it gives them that genetic and evolutionary advantage, and again you know linking back to the evolutionary history of sea turtles, this is another reason why they’re so successful through evolution. They’re able to have diversification within their nest which gives them that advantage, so it’s quite interesting. What I will also say is obviously we come across in the Maldives quite a number of entangled olive ridleys, and often these entanglements result in missing flippers. So you can imagine the trauma that a female with a missing flipper must go through when you’ve got multiple males competing for courtship. Because that female, obviously they need to breathe, they need to come to the surface, they’ve got lungs just like us, so we need to come to the surface, they need to take a breath, but obviously if they’re missing a flipper that’s going to be very difficult for them, so it must be very traumatic. We know that they can because we’ve seen nesting females in various different locations in the world with missing flippers, so we know they’re able to reproduce, we know they’re able to come to the beaches and lay their eggs, so it’s quite promising. But nevertheless it’s quite disconcerting when you see that because you know the trauma that’s about to ensue, so yeah so the mating process is very dramatic but it’s equally very interesting!

Minnie: That’s really really interesting actually, because we’re going to be talking in the future about things like the actual nesting process and embryology – so the development of embryos within the egg – so it’s good to know the kind of starting point. And it’s relevant for our particular kind of threats that we’ve discussed and I suppose that might maybe lead on to a little question I have. Is there an aspect of sea turtle conservation that you think might be overlooked? You know, is there anything that you feel could do with more exposure as a sea turtle conservationist?

Martin: Yeah I guess with that question, it really depends on what your personal experiences are. Me, I’m coming from a very privileged background, I’m well educated, I’m from the UK, I can come back to the UK at any point. I have a very different perspective than maybe others. But I think sometimes, and I have seen it and I’m exposed to this more often than I would like. But I see that in conservation, particularly of sea turtles, I think the cultural aspects of that conservation is often overlooked and there’s a great scientist Dr Karthik Shankar actually, who talks a lot about this importance of cultural acknowledgement and involvement in conservation.

But time and time again I see it overlooked and we have this kind of sometimes when people come in from a well-educated background they can come with ideas as if they are the oracle, as if it’s the absolute and it’s the only way it can be done. But actually what we’ve got to remember is conservation, it’s all about people really. Without the people inside within a management plan or a species protection plan, then you have no conservation. So this is something that I think is overlooked and I’d like to see a change now. And again it we’re not perfect at the olive ridley project at all by any stretch but we’re trying to kind of um acknowledge that is the case and decolonise if you like, as much as we can. But obviously, by definition, I’m the founder of the charity, it makes my kind of comments almost redundant if you like. But I definitely acknowledge it and I see it and it makes me cringe. So I you know these are the things I want to try and work with others that are way more intelligent than me to get this problem dealt with.

Minnie: As someone who’s also very privileged to to live in the maldives for two years working with the olive ridley project it was actually my experience with our Maldivian colleagues, who taught me everything I needed to know about about the Maldives, as much as I could take on board and as much as um they could share. And I think we’re really moving towards the really valuable aspect of having as many local citizens involved. The longevity of that project is contingent on the support and the sort of dissemination of skills and the sharing of experiences amongst people um and so I think yeah it’s a really really important aspect of conservation.

Martin: The interesting thing about the Maldives, and it is a bit of an exception I guess is that the government is very progressive in terms of its way of thinking. So, you know for example they’re taking the lead on genetics with sea turtles, they’re obviously supporting that research and taking the lead on it which is a great thing to to see um and also an acknowledgement of infrastructure, if the infrastructure is not there they’re open to making that infrastructure and developing it and there are no courses or training facilities for veterinary science, and yet this is something that we’re exploring and the government are also potentially looking at as well. And these are the things that you know we need more of. We need governments to take a bit of a stand, see where the limitations are and try to just improve on them and there’s so much knowledge held up in various different sectors whether it be through local communities, whether it be for government branches. I think collaborating within, internally as well would be  a major leap forward and it’s you know not just in all these I think any political system is the same it’s the same. In the UK often there’s fractured communications between different political sectors and I think if we can collaborate within, internally, then we’re going to make a bigger change.

Minnie: Absolutely. We’re going to have to sort of wrap it up there but I really want to ask you kind of one quite open question here. What is your hope for the future of sea turtle conservation?

Martin: Wow, I guess I’ve got two hopes I guess the first hope is what I’ve touched on previously about the cultural aspects of conservation. My hope is that we embed culture in our conservation practices, that’s one of my biggest hopes for sea turtle conservation from my experience, from what I have seen, from where I have come from also. Secondly I think collaboration. We’re very good at collaborating but often when it comes to things like permits and collaborating with governments, that’s when it becomes very very difficult, and I’d like to see a change in that attitude. A way that we can collaborate regardless of which jurisdiction you are representing, I think that would be crucial in making proper changes in conservation. So there are my two hopes, collaboration and embedding culture in conservation.

Minnie: I think that sounds very very hopeful, very sensible I think. Like you say collaboration, working together is the single biggest thing we can do to ensure these projects are viable and as vibrant as they are. So yeah, I certainly agree with you there.

Thank you Martin for sharing all of that with us. We really appreciate you starting off our podcast series. It’s really nice to get an insight into the current issues and your interests, s um thank you so much for that.

Martin: Thank you so much for having me Minnie, and yeah super excited to see this unfold. Me and my wife actually are really excited to listen to all of the guests as well. I’m quite boring, I’ll tell you that. So it will be nice to have some really interesting guests on, and yeah we’re really excited to listen to them, so yeah.

Minnie: Yeah I’m really excited for everyone to sort of hear these different scientists and really experienced people talk about their specific area of interest or research, we have got some really fascinating stuff coming up. With that we are going to sign off and say a huge thank you to our listeners. It’s been really exciting to share this first episode with you, and I hope you really enjoyed it. We would love to hear from you, so please do leave us a review and let us know your thoughts.

If you would like to learn more about sea turtles and ORP’s work, please visit our website oliveridleyproject.org, where you can also support our work by naming and adopting a sea turtle, adopting one of our sea turtle patients or making a donation.”

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We’ll see you for our next episode, and until then, stay turtley awesome.