Written in March, 2018 for the Brisbane World Science Festival
The 2018 World Science Festival may be over but the journey has just begun for 40 of the festival’s star attractions.
For the third year in a row, about 40 Loggerhead turtle eggs were brought to the Queensland Museum from Mon Repos, Bundaberg.
The turtle hatching timing is calculated by Dr Colin Limpus, who has been working with turtles at Mon Repos for over 50 years, before they’re taken to the Museum for the exhibit.
Senior Curator of Reptiles and Amphibians, Patrick Couper, looks after the eggs while they hatch over the four days.
“They started collecting around the 26th of January on consecutive nights – 10 eggs per clutch – and [Dr Limpus] calculates the temperature of around 29.9 degrees,” Mr Couper said.
“They’ll take around 54 days to hatch.”
“When they collect them, turtle eggs are very delicate in those earlier stages of incubation; if you rotate an egg you can kill it,” said Mr Couper.
“[Dr Limpus] incubates them up there in a very temperature-controlled situation until they’re robust enough to move to Brisbane.
“I pick them up after about a month.”
Once the turtles have hatched and are about a week old, Mr Couper separates them from the other young turtles to start the feeding process.
These turtles will be taken to the coast of Mooloolaba some time next week where they will be put into the Eastern Australian Current and will continue on their journey.
“They’ll ride that Eastern Australian Current past the northern tip of New Zealand, across the coasts of Chile and Peru, they’ll come back into Australian waters 16 years later,” Mr Couper said.
“At that point they then have to grow for another 14 years until they’re sexually mature before they begin any of their breeding migrations back to South East Queensland.”
Mr Couper said the decision to take them up the coast came down to animal welfare and minimising the stress to the turtles.
“It’s a one-hour drive to Mooloolaba, it’s 20 kilometers out to the Eastern Australian Current, and if there’s a delay because of weather they’re cared for,” he said.
This, according to Mr Couper, is a much less stressful journey than the five hours to Bundaberg and the 100km from Mon Repos to the Eastern Australian Current.
Mr Couper said the question he gets asked the most is ‘do they need to go back to Mon Repos where they came from?'
The answer, according to Mr Couper, is no.
“The imprinting on a region is more a regional thing rather than on a specific small beach,” said Mr Couper.
“Some of them could indeed turn up at Mon Repos, but that’s more by chance than design.”
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