Suchergebnisse

The loggerhead sea turtle is the most common sea turtle in South Carolina. Loggerhead turtles are susceptible to a number of threats, both natural and man-made. The SCDNR Marine Turtle Conservation Program monitors nesting and stranding (turtles that wash ashore) trends, trains nest protection and stranding network participants and coordinates with various government agencies and private groups to mitigate factors impacting sea turtles.

Kartik Shanker is a biologist at the Centre for Ecological Studies, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He has published on sea turtle biology and marine conservation and is the immediate past President of the International Sea Turtle Society. He edits the journal Conservation and Society, based in India and offering analyses of global conservation politics and ecology which foreground the perspectives of the global South. This journal focuses on communication not only between researchers and advocates working in the ecological sciences and in social science and humanities, but in fostering communication between academic researchers on the one hand and community and NGO audiences on the other.

This interview was conducted by Nick McClean during Kartik's visit to Sydney for the Cities Nature Justice conference, held 10 – 12 December, 2008, at the University of Technology Sydney. Nick McClean is currently undertaking PhD research at ANU on comparative approaches to conservation in Australia and India.

This article contains extracts from an unpublished dissertation, University of Birmingham, 1988. It describes and evaluates a practical project in which blind and partially sighted children used a floor turtle to find out about space. In particular, the activities gave them valuable experience in using the concepts of right and left and in performing accurate facing movements.

Abstract
Chelonians (turtles, tortoises, and sea turtles) grow scute keratin in sequential layers over time. Once formed, scute keratin acts as an inert reservoir of environmental information. For chelonians inhabiting areas with legacy or modern nuclear activities, their scute has the potential to act as a time-stamped record of radionuclide contamination in the environment. Here, we measure bulk (i.e. homogenized scute) and sequential samples of chelonian scute from the Republic of the Marshall Islands and throughout the United States of America, including at the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range, southwestern Utah, the Savannah River Site, and the Oak Ridge Reservation. We identify legacy uranium (235U and 236U) contamination in bulk and sequential chelonian scute that matches known nuclear histories at these locations during the 20th century. Our results confirm that chelonians bioaccumulate uranium radionuclides and do so sequentially over time. This technique provides both a time series approach for reconstructing nuclear histories from significant past and present contexts throughout the world and the ability to use chelonians for long-term environmental monitoring programs (e.g. sea turtles at Enewetok and Bikini Atolls in the Republic of the Marshall Islands and in Japan near the Fukushima Daiichi reactors).