Brilliant participation of Chilean delegation in sea turtles international activity
October 11th, 2022
this activity was held in Ecuador, IFOP attended represented by Dr. Patricia Zárate in her capacity as a member of the Technical Scientific Committee of sea turtles of Southeast Pacific of South Pacific Permanent Commission (CPPS)
These activities will bring together technical scientific committees delegates from Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Chile.
Regional Workshop “Marking of Sea Turtles in the Southeast Pacific” was held on October 3rd and 4th, at Pachoche Coastal Marine Wildlife Refuge, in Manabí Province Ecuador.
Dr. Zárate explains that the workshop’s objective is to have a standardized marking methodology for the region. The marking itself consists of placing an identification mark, which can be external, such as a metallic mark, or an internal one, such as a microchip, of the same type that is placed on pets. Currently, not all the projects that are being carried out do the marking in the same way, as an example, there are those who install the external marks on the front fins and others on the rear ones, which implies that on some occasions it could be thought that a turtle is unmarked if only the front flippers are checked, and the same can happen with a microchip placed in a different location. In addition to the work that we will do to review each country used techniques and to determine methodology standard, we will have the opportunity to visit San Lorenzo nesting beach where we will put this methodology into practice on its sea turtles population which are nesting there, thus being able to determinate its possible problems or effects. It is extremely important, mentions Dr. Zárate, to have same tagging methodology in the region, considering that we want to evaluate the population trends of each species of sea turtle and their connectivity.
Dr. Zárate mentions “the second activity to be held on October 5th in Manta is te IV Technical Scientific Committee Meeting for the 2022-2023 biennium. “This committee represents the technical advisory body to implement the Southeast Pacific Regional Program for Sea Turtles Conservation and in this session the tagging workshop results and guidelines to be followed will be evaluated and discussed, which should consider potential problems and recommendations for collecting minimum tagging data at regional level. Another aspect of the agenda considers a regional database creation where each party country will register their tags used in each species monitored in their country, whether in feeding or nesting areas. Dr. Zárate adds “the creation of this regional database will help us improve our current knowledge regarding the connectivity of sea turtles in the region of the commission”.