My name's Larry Wood and I'm the founder and director of the Florida Hawksbill Project.
The idea behind the Florida Hawksbill Project is to document the abundance and distribution
of hawksbill turtles along Florida's coastline.
So this is an animal that has been very close to extinction.
We'd like to think that they're on their way back, we'd like to think there's some
good news in their recovery, but this is an animal that genuinely needs a few people helping
them out.
And so I'd like to find out as much as I can about them so we can apply that information
to their protection.
Offshore there's a whole population of hawksbill turtles that use the reefs, but don't use
the beaches.
And this was one of the important questions we were wondering is why then, since these
turtles really don't need Florida for reproduction, why would there be as many as there are here?
The license plate program has been absolutely critical to me being able to get the equipment
required to ask some of these questions.
So what we're finding is that Florida is an important place for at least some of the
hawksbills that are found around the region to come and develop.
Hawksbill turtles, like many other sea turtle species, take a while to get old enough and
large enough to reproduce themselves.
That can be 20 years or more.
So they have to find a place that's safe enough to grow up before they're even ready to go
reproduce themselves.
Once they find a spot to hang out, they tend to do so for quite a while in a fairly small
location.
And we do come across one that we'd like to sample or tag or learn a little bit more about.
We can gently hand capture the turtle and then bring it to the surface and then put
it aboard a boat, at which time we can do measurements.
We can take samples.
We can take photographs.
And we can also tag the turtles for future identification.
Okay.
46.6.
We'd like to know a little bit more about how they move around the habitat.
Satellite tracking devices can be very useful today.
We can really get answers nowadays to how they live in such a remote, far away, hard
to find sort of place.
And so the satellite tracking devices that were provided by the Sea Turtle License Plate
Program have been absolutely instrumental in determining the type of habitats they
like and how they use these habitats, what's the range, what's the movement patterns.
Once we know where Hawksbill turtles are, we can more effectively protect them.
Thank you for your time.
