IMIS - Marine Research Groups

A number of Fraser Island Park Rangers and the Lighthouse Keepers were inducted into turtle I.D., tagging, and data sheet entry and so began an 18 year monitoring program, with a 17 night mid-season nesting census and flipper tagging of all turtles coming ashore during the census across the 44km of beach from Rooney Point to Ngkala Rocks.

In that first season the first nest relocation to near the Lighthouse gate by vehicle was trialed, using three doomed clutches laid below the king tide level.

This was successful and since then 5 nest relocation cages with a total capacity of 120 clutches have been developed at strategic locations along the rookery, and recently also at Orchid Beach, to enable protection of doomed loggerhead and green clutches, and to provide protection for a percentage of loggerhead clutches from vehicle and camping impacts, and dingo and goanna (monitor lizard) depredation.

In the first few years in the 1990's between 50 to 100 greens, but only 5 to 7 loggerheads were nesting annually, and drowned adult loggerhead turtles were being found washed up on the beach.

Nesting numbers increased to twelve to fifteen loggerheads a year from 1997 when a seasonal two mile trawl exclusion zone was established along the NW beach between Rooney Point and Sandy Cape, and then climbed to 50 nesting each year after the introduction of TEDs, (Turtle Exclusion Devices) in the Queensland trawl fishery nets in 2001.
Currently annually about 40 to 50 loggerheads nest along the 44 kilometers of the Rooney Point to Sandy Cape to Ngkala Rocks rookery, and between 50 and 100 loggerhead nests are protected by relocation each season, by the Sandy Cape Lighthouse Volunteer Caretakers, in a program supported by QPWS.

Green nests are not generally relocated as the Southern Barrier Reef green turtle population is still slowly increasing since turtle protection in Queensland began in the early 1950s.

While most commonly between 50 and 100 green turtles come in to nest each year, a factor that provides some protection to the greens is their pattern of sometimes alternatively flooding the predators one season with a mass nesting and starving them the next. The largest cyclic influx of nesting green turtles saw them varying from over 600 nesting in the Sandy Cape rookery one season, to three nesting the nest season.

A study of dingo impacts on the nests saw nest depredation vary between 15% in a season when there was a mass nesting of over 250 greens and 85% when there were only about 30 greens nesting.

A potential new threat to the rookery is the advance of feral foxes up Fraser Island. They are in large numbers on the adjacent mainland and are good swimmers.
Recently foxes have been sighted at Awinya Creek, only 30 to 40 kilometers from either end of the Sandy Cape rookery, and monitoring of nests for any fox impacts will guide management plans to provide further protection.

Over the years since 1993 over 500 male green turtles were tagged courting in the shallows or basking on the beach, and a correlation between their numbers and the size of the concurrent green nesting season was observed. Some were found to be carrying flipper tags from the Shoalwater Bay turtle rodeo program, and Fraser Island tagged males were being found at Shoalwater Bay, and in the Witsundays.

It was found that female green turtles tagged on Fraser in the September/October courting season were being seen that season nesting further north at other rookeries in the Southern Great Barrier Reef, and at the Wreck Rock.

Two seasons ago two males were tagged while courting at Sandy Cape and one returned home to Shoalwater Bay and one to the outer Barrier Reef near Olympic Reef.

Last season the green female April O'Moreton who was tagged as a juvenile in 1992 in Moreton Bay was found courting at Sandy Cape and given a satellite tracker, and she moved on to nest at North West Island in the Capricorn Bunker group.

This season the project hopes with six males being tracked, to expand the knowledge of where they come from to court at Fraser Island, and what connectivity they have to other known courting areas.

Three females are being tracked this season - one with a history of nesting at Fraser Island, one known to forage in the Witsundays, and one known to nest in the Capricorn Bunker group.
Supplemental information: Visit STAT's project page for additional information. This dataset is a summarized representation of the telemetry locations aggregated per species per 1-degree cell.