Hello Laidlaw people!
As the third week draws to a close, I wanted to give you guys an update.
This week I managed to complete an Emergency First Responder Course, and officially became a rescue diver. This was a pretty tiring course, involving many pretend rescues from rescuing divers who were unresponsive underwater to panicked divers on the surface. Luckily, the rescuee we used for the scenarios weighed roughly half mine, so carrying her out the water wasn't too bad.
The week has also continued with the same work dives, as new volunteers continue to come and go. There was a whale shark sighting, and for the following couple of days any work dive was done tentatively as we constantly glanced up to see if it might've suddenly appeared.
I've made some progress with the turtle facial ID software, finding an open source repository providing tools for general animal reidentification using neural networks, as well as an extensive labelled turtle database. The current software TRACC uses, I3S, was developed using the analysis of the pigmentation on turtle facial scutes, which as it turns out is prone to fade over time with scratching and aging - turtle scutes are the unique facial 'scales' of a turtle. However, the three post-ocular scutes of a turtle seem to be enough to allow for turtle reidentification, a facial feature less prone to change with time. This I will focus on next week.
On another note, it seems the interchange between tourism and the island has brought up another issue, this time with the island's sand. Concrete fortifications built by some resorts to guard their sand from the waves and tide, block the natural erosion of the sand and result in less sand being deposited on other parts of the island as it is moved around Pom Pom. This has resulted in an increase in erosion of some parts of the island where there are no resorts, leading to a shift in the island's structure. The fear is that this could recede into the forest habitats, and negatively impact the island's on land ecosystem. On a lighter note, the introduction of cats to the island over the past few years has reduced the number of birds and in turn led to a centipede infestation on the island. Fun!
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Kaito, it seems you really have become part of the team as you note other volunteers "come and go"! Congratulations on the rescue diver qualification, it is a fantastic accomplishment! I am excited to hear more about the turtle ID software, it will be interesting to see whether the post-ocular scutes are able to provide an enhanced and longer term way of tracking and ID'ing the turtles. The trouble of beach drift (or preventing beach drift) in this case is a long standing issue and not unique to island contexts. The UK faces similar issues along some of its coast line leading to cliff face collapse. This compounded with perhaps cuter but still dangerous impacts on the ecosystem (yay centipedes) really demonstrate the small actions with large consequences human action can make. Wishing you luck for the coming week! Thank you for the photos of the team, cat and Whale Shark!