Meet the Green Sea Turtle!

hey everyone N and I are on vacation we are on the lovely island of Grand Cayman which is home to the world-famous Cayman turtle Center the green sea turtle is a large tropical species of turtle that grows to around 3 feet in diameter on average although some individuals have been recorded up to 5 feet in diameter due to their large size adults can weigh upwards of 300 pounds although some of those five footers have been recorded to weigh over 600 pounds these guys are massive and you can only imagine how much food they go through they are also a very long-lived species of turtle those that survive into adulthood can live upwards of 80 years or more this is one of the green sea turtles that became in turtle center and these days grow incredibly fast believe it or not it's only a year old unfold so they grow very quickly to become out of predator I guess prey for most predators and once they get to around the size it's not nearly as many animals will eat them their shells are just gorgeous though look at their shell it's so smooth and these are strong animals too I was not expecting it to be so dense it's probably a good 15 20 pounds behind me is the breeding pond here at the caiman turtle center this is where all of the adults are kept and ordered for breeding purposes the green sea turtle will breed at around 16 to 25 years old and after that the breeding of the reproduction rate really starts to go down drastically but it takes them upwards of 16 years in order to become fully mature in breeding age the breeding season for these magnificent Turtles is from June through September during which time they will lay three to seven clutches of eggs each clutch containing between 100 and 120 golf-ball-sized eggs what the females do is at night they will crawl on to shore and dig into their preferred nesting site they'll kind of choose what area they think will work best sometimes they choose better than others and they will dig down about 3 feet using their back flippers and that's where they will deposit their eggs and kind of use their back flippers to kick the sand over them and cover them up and this entire process often takes all night before they are finally empty and able to go back into the water here at the center the morning after those eggs are laid since they're monitored so closely here the staff will dig up and carefully remove those deposited eggs and put them into their indoor incubator you see in the wild the since they're buried 3 feet underground the babies the first ones to come out will dig to the surface and they push more sand onto the nests behind them as they emerge which sometimes trap some of those babies and then they die before they can even come out of the sand between that and all the predators they face as babies and having to find food in the wild only about 1% of baby's green sea turtles make it to full adulthood whereas here at the facility they can take care of them in a controlled environment and not only do they increase their survival rate to about 80 to 95 percent but they can also control which ones are males and which ones are females based on the temperature they're incubated at with sea turtles or green sea turtles if the eggs are incubated above 82 degrees they end up being females if they're incubated below 82 degrees they end up being males here at the facility they want about 50 50 s so they incubate them all at about 82 degrees the center is so successful at hatching and raising green sea turtles they have actually released over 35,000 individuals back into the wild since they opened once the eggs are laid they are immediately collected and then brought into incubation at this hatchery so I think we should go inside and see what babies are in there and maybe we'll even get to see some eggs too who knows well we are inside of the hatchery unfortunately we just missed the tail end of green sea turtle breeding season so there are no eggs or babies at this time of year however there's a mock up and you can kind of see this is actually the hatching room so this is an heated room that they store all of the eggs in until they hatch hatching is really interesting since the eggs are laid upwards of 30 inches below the sand it can take upwards of a week for the babies to crawl all the way out during that time their umbilical cord dries up and closes off so inside of this room they're buried under only about 3 to 4 inches of sand so the babies come out really quickly compared to what they would in a wild and as a result they sometimes still have a little bit of that umbilical cord still remaining even after they're out of the sand once the babies are out they are closely monitored until they are ready for the water and then they're moved to baby tanks inside and it takes a couple of months before they are brought outside into that door facilities what we did find inside of the hatchery though was an adult sea turtle shell there's no way I'd be able to hold an actual sea turtle if it was an adult so I'm just gonna have to do with the show but just like all turtles they're back vertebrae are fused to their rib bones which are modified ribs that can actually create the shell itself so really needs to see that it's tough to hit solids here feel that this is heavy just the shell alone right wait a minute we I know it's surprised me too when I first picked it up once the green turtles reach about two months old they're moved from the indoor facility into these outdoor holding pools to grow up a little bit more in here we have a little two month old green sea turtle now these guys are very active and surprisingly scratching under their chin actually calms them down the green sea turtle is a herbivore so they eat primarily plant matter in the form of algae in the wild but believe it or not different species of sea turtles have different native diets these are the herbivores and there's others that are more carnivorous like the longer head sea turtles but this little guy I'll put him back and I think there's one a little bit bigger over here Wow look at the red coloration of this one that one is just gorgeous this one's a little bit closer to about five or six months old I would imagine and the green sea turtles have these little thumbs on their front flippers they have a spur up here and on the back they also have a spur on their flippers back here now the sea turtles unlike our North American species of turtles that actually have webbed feet and distinctive toes and that helps them come out onto land to bask in the Sun sea turtles have evolved in our built for a life purely in the water they stay in the water their entire life after they emerge from the eggs unless they are laying their eggs that's really the only time they come out onto the sand and to lay those eggs and then they return right back to the water we found one more look at this adorable little guy he just must have just recently been moved out to this outdoor enclosure tuffet or one there this scoots don't overlap on their shelf so they are incredibly smooth on their carapace which is the upper portion of their shelf the lower portion is called the plastron everything is covered in scoots which are these individual scales that are all over their shelf sexy sea turtles is very similar to sexing other species of turtles and tortoises basically males have longer tails than females if you look at this one's tail it's very long which indicates that it is a male and if you look at the one over here it has a very short tail so this is a female males also have more pronounced spurs on their front flippers all right guys do you see what this is look what we found this is a bite mark something took a little chomp out of this Ranger out of this leaf here and I suspect it's probably a certain lizard that's taking over Grand Cayman right now they're very invasive the green iguana if you look there's more bite marks they see that you're they're very prolific so they breed a lot and since there's so many individuals on the island they are eating like all of their plants and eating the food sources of the native caiman iguana which is now endangered because of that but where is not only does the caiman turtle Center have green sea turtles which is what they specialize in but they also have a small greeting group of Kemp's ridley sea turtles this is a smaller species of sea turtle only reaching about two to two-and-a-half feet in diameter of their size so these are adults males they are the most endangered sea turtle in the entire world but the caiman turtle Center was the first facility to successfully breed them in captivity and they were so successful that back in 1999 they sent a hundred and ten captive bred babies back into the wild in Mexico where they are native to this is one of the carnivorous species of sea turtle they come Friendly's have a very strong jaw that allows them to crunch the shells of crabs and clams mussels snails other invertebrates and mussels and they particularly love actually a Saki bodied animal to squid that's what they're being fed right now along with sardines they're fed three times a day here at the facility but it looks like they really like the squid to the point where they go around and eat all of that first and then they clean up the sardine afterwards so this breeding facility is doing a lot of great conservation work this is Bendel once you saw that we were filming he flagged us down to show us some of the highlights around the park unfortunately because of the background noises it was hard to hear the audio so I'm gonna try my best to interpret what he's teaching us here we've just been told that we're gonna be shown the biggest turtle that is at this facility so are they still are good guys 1:41 awesome I feel bad taking out of the water well after being introduced to these amazing endangered animals we also got the opportunity to swim with the green sea turtles as you can see my hair is still wet we just came from that but they're free swimming in this entire lagoon area and we were able to check them out and see them up close and personal so we're going to end today's video with some of the clips we managed to take more of Ed's clips than mine because my phone liked it I guess when it's underwater freaks out so we'll be using mostly Ed's clips for those but I hope you enjoy it and thank you for joining us today and watching today's video if you are ever in Grand Cayman we highly recommend you check out the caiman turtle Center it is amazing and it is worth the trip it's just we're spending all day here thanks again and we'll see you next week [Music] [Music] you [Music] [Music] another lizard that lives here natively on Grand Cayman is the curly tailed lizard you can see how he gets its name we have a male adult male here he's kind of head bobbing a little bit and if you look close you'll see how his tail has a different textured look to the rest of his body that indicates that his tail has regrown so it doesn't look like what it originally did I'm trying to see how close I can get to this guy unlike green iguanas these are insect eaters so they're actually good to have on the island they'll eat spiders they eat any small insect that they can catch of it basically and they're very very quick so there's no chance I'm gonna be able to catch him but I've got to try he's like putting me back you wanted to be picked up right now you have some angry sandpipers - chasing each other around this so salty [Music]

Channel: Snake Discovery

Views: 1,022,580

Rating: 4.9311409 out of 5

Keywords: sea turtles, sea turtle, green sea turtle, loggerhead turtle, turtles, endangered animal, grand cayman, turtle center, turtle breeder, leatherback

Id: Ay6Xtgxa_ZU

Length: 14min 14sec (854 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 14 2018