By Dora Szabados | Country Director
Dear Supporters,
One of the major focuses for our conservation projects here in Phang Nga is working with our local partners at marine turtle head-start centres. The centres work to rear green turtle hatchlings to an age of between 6 months and 1 year to then release them, by which time they will have a much greater chance of surviving to reach breeding age. We have been focusing heavily on our enrichment ideas for the turtles, providing devices which can be placed in the tanks to provide opportunities for the turtles to develop their natural behaviours such as foraging and sheltering from danger.
One of our short-term interns used turtle enrichment as the focus for their leadership project, spending time brainstorming ideas, building enrichment and then testing it out. In addition to this, we have just purchased a wave machine to use in the turtle tanks to create movement of the water to replicate more natural ocean conditions; if this is successful we will look to purchase more of these. We have also been working hard on developing our study of the enrichment, coming up with a method to collect data that provides tangible evidence to show the benefits of providing environmental enrichment. Our hope is that in the longer term, this research could influence ideas and practices at other head-start centres. We have been working with our partners Shark Guardian for quite some time on the publication of their educational children’s book about sharks. The book has been translated into Thai and we are pleased to announce that it will be launched in one of our local Thai schools this November! This book will provide education on species that these children would otherwise likely never learn about, and will hopefully act to dispel some of the fear and negativity regarding sharks.
We have also provided funds for the production of some well designed, visually striking, informative posters about sharks. Each poster will feature a specific collection of sharks by their orders (family groups) and contain conservation-related information about each shark. This includes their conservation status as determined by the IUCN and also some key facts about each shark. These posters will be an invaluable tool for educating people about sharks and the importance of conserving them. Education is one of the strongest tools we have as conservationists and these posters will help to raise much needed awareness of the issues facing sharks and their importance to healthy ecosystems. Our work on the islands is still progressing, we are yet to capture a pangolin on camera but we still see signs of them each time that we visit the islands. We have unfortunately suffered a couple of camera malfunctions in the past months due to the weather during the monsoon season here. Even so, we have been getting some great pictures of monkeys, deer, and even a mystery cat species (a mystery as unfortunately the photos were not quite clear enough to identify it).
We have also purchased rechargeable batteries to use in our cameras, which means that we will no longer be using single use batteries which are difficult to dispose of in an environmentally sound way, so this is a great improvement for our environmental footprint.
Thank you for all your support!
All the best,
Dora Szabados
By Katie Woodroffe | Conservation Coordinator & Assistant Base Manager
By Dora Szabados | GVI Phang Nga, Base Manager
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