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Cayman Islands 2005: Green Turtles

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Availability: Creative Commons License This dataset is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Notes: Only data aggregated per 1-degree cell are available through OBIS. For access to additional data, the provider needs to be contacted.

Description
With the help of schools and the community, the Cayman Islands Department of Environment and the Marine Turtle Research Group have begun a satellite telemetry project to track our historically and culturally important sea turtles for the first time. more

When Christopher Columbus discovered the Cayman Islands in 1503, he named them Las Tortugas (the turtles). Ferdinand Columbus recounted that the islands were full of tortoises, as was all the sea about, insomuch as that they looked like little rocks. The green turtle population was estimated at over 6.5 million turtles at the time of the discovery, and turtle fishing (turtling) came to form the basis of the economy and culture of the Cayman Islands. This historical importance is memorialized in our Coat of Arms and currency, but by the beginning of the 19th century, commercial exploitation had driven the immense green turtle nesting population in the Cayman Islands to the brink of extinction. Wild turtles continue have a central place in the memories and experiences of many of our citizens, but today, only a few dozen nesting sea turtles remain. Where do these endangered greens and loggerheads go after they leave our beaches.

Scope
Themes:
Biology > Reptiles
Keywords:
Marine/Coastal, Sea turtles, Telemetry, ASW, Cayman I., Chelonia mydas (Linnaeus, 1758)

Geographical coverage
ASW, Cayman I. [Marine Regions]

Temporal coverage
25 July 2005 - 23 August 2006

Taxonomic coverage
Chelonia mydas (Linnaeus, 1758) [WoRMS]

Parameter
Abundance

Contributors
Seaturtle.org, moredata creator
Marine Turtle Research Group, more

Related datasets
Published in:
OBIS-SEAMAP: Spatial Ecological Analysis of Megavertebrate Populations, more

URLs
Dataset information:

Dataset status: Completed
Data type: Data
Data origin: Research
Metadatarecord created: 2013-06-26
Information last updated: 2013-10-25
All data in the Integrated Marine Information System (IMIS) is subject to the VLIZ privacy policy