September 19th, 2016 — After a summer marked by boat repairs, a paucity of jellyfish and a presidential no-fly zone, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scientists finally got what they wanted Saturday — an “epic” day of picture-perfect weather and leatherback turtles swimming off the coast of Nantucket.
It was the best possible outcome for engineer Amy Kukulya and biologist Kara Dodge, the duo behind last year’s TurtleCam crowdfunding project. They were able to tag and track a leatherback turtle for four hours and capture huge amounts of data and video of the creature’s feeding habits and behavior. And best of all, the TurtleCam — a modified REMUS-100 autonomous underwater vehicle equipped with video cameras — was able to hone in on the acoustic tag and follow the turtle, just as designed.
“Everything was just exactly how we wanted it to go,” said Dodge.
The TurtleCam project raised nearly $11,000 last summer through Project WHOI, the institution’s crowdfunding site, and a private donor chipped in another $20,000, Dodge said. That helped the team get a turtle tagged in 2015, but more importantly it allowed them to land a $240,000 National Marine Fisheries Service grant to the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, their partners on the TurtleCam project. In all, the project is now funded for seven full days at sea, Dodge said.
This year, the acoustic tag attached to the leatherbacks has been upgraded with two suction cups and a video camera to get some turtle-eye views of the sea, Kukulya said. She and Dodge won’t review the footage until today, but Kukulya said she couldn’t resist a quick peek Sunday morning.