Mass-nesting events in olive ridley sea turtles: environmental predictors of timing and size
Section snippets
Study Site
The Ostional National Wildlife Refuge is located on the northern Pacific peninsula of Costa Rica (Fig. 1). Within the Refuge, Ostional Beach comprises approximately 4 km of coastline. For research and monitoring purposes, the beach is divided into 50 m sectors numbered from north to south. The data used in this study were collected as part of a long-term monitoring project authorized under Costa Rica permits (MINAE-SINAC-ACT, ACT-OR-DR-033-17).
Mass-nesting Census Data
We analysed approximately 10 years (July
Patterns of Mass-nesting Behaviour
During the 10-year period encompassed by the data set, a mean of 11 ± 0.2 (mean ± SEM) mass-nesting events occurred each year. Arribadas had a mean duration of 3 ± 0.2 days and a mean interval of 34 ± 1.4 days between events. The interval between events was longer in the dry season (37 ± 2.3 days) than in the rainy season (32 ± 1.8 days; t test: t1 = -1.77, N = 103 intervals, P = 0.040). During the rainy season, two events occurred within a single month on nine occasions; this never occurred during the dry
Discussion
Several authors have speculated that environmental cues such as onshore winds, precipitation, lunar phase and/or tidal cycle either trigger or strongly influence the timing of mass-nesting events in ridley turtles (Carr, 1967, Hughes and Richard, 1974, Jiménez-Quiroz et al., 2005, Plotkin et al., 1997, Pritchard, 1969). These suggestions have arisen largely from anecdotal observations and short-term studies spanning periods of a few months. By contrast, our study of mass-nesting events over a
Funding
This work was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (to V.S.B.) and a National Science Foundation grant (IOS-1456923) to K.J.L.
Declaration of Competing Interest
We declare no financial or competing interests.
Acknowledgments
We thank the Área de Conservación Tempisque regional sea turtle project for providing the data used in this study, which was collected as part of a larger investigation authorized under Costa Rica permits (MINAE-SINAC-ACT, ACT-OR-DR-033-17). We are grateful to G. Bran, Y. Arguello, J. Quiros, J. Pablo, Y. Cedeño, L. Brenes and all of the research assistants and volunteers at the Ostional National Wildlife Refuge for making this research possible. We thank R. Johnson for collecting and providing
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