Nesting Activity of the Loggerhead Turtle (Caretta caretta) in South Carolina I: A Rookery in Transition

Talbert, O R; Stancyk, Stephen E.; Dean, John Mark; Will, John M.

doi:10.2307/1444448

Cited by 42 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Several authors have suggested that predation risk should change over the nesting season due to shifts in predator activity related to nest availability or to predator learning (Stancyk, 1982;Nellis & Small, 1983;Leighton, Horrocks & Kramer, 2009), but seasonal changes in predation risk have only been documented in a few studies (Fowler, 1979;Talbert et al, 1980;Engeman et al, 2003). In addition, various studies have reported more frequent nest predation near the start (Stancyk, Nellis & Small, 1983;Goncalves, Cechin & Bager, 2007;Leighton et al, 2009) or the end (Fowler, 1979;Nellis & Small, 1983) of incubation, but the relationship between daily predation risk and nest age has not been rigorously explored.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predicting nest survival in sea turtles: when and where are eggs most vulnerable to predation?

Leighton

Horrocks

Kramer

2010

Animal Conservation

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Nest predation is an important practical challenge for the conservation of egglaying reptiles, with the potential to reduce hatchling recruitment and slow the recovery of threatened populations. Accurately forecasting where and when predation will occur has the potential to optimize predation management. Survival analysis, a set of statistical techniques recently popularized in studies of avian nest success, provides a unique approach for modelling variation in egg mortality risk throughout development. We used Cox proportional hazards regression to model the survival of sea turtle eggs from predation by the small Asian mongoose Herpestes javanicus, a widely introduced and destructive sea turtle nest predator in the Caribbean. We evaluated the ability of models to predict egg survival using 7 years of nest predation data for critically endangered hawksbill sea turtles Eretmochelys imbracata in Barbados. Daily predation risk was the highest for freshly laid nests, decreasing rapidly with nest age but increasing again near the end of development. Predation risk was the highest in and near patches of beach vegetation, increased over the nesting season and increased with nest density on the open beach but not in vegetation. Survival models calibrated using data from 2004 to 2005 showed excellent discrimination and Z84% accuracy when predicting the fate of nests from previous years. Our study provides the first quantification of the daily variation in predation risk for incubating turtle eggs, revealing a narrow time window early in development during which the application of predation reduction measures is likely to have the greatest impact on nest survival. More generally, we demonstrate the utility of survival analysis for generating finescale predictions of spatiotemporal variation in turtle egg mortality, providing a flexible tool for the conservation of sea turtles and other egg-laying reptiles.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predicting nest survival in sea turtles: when and where are eggs most vulnerable to predation?

Leighton

Horrocks

Kramer

2010

Animal Conservation

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“…In addition, nest site fixity, i.e. the tendency for an individual female to cluster its nests, has been observed within a given season (renesting events) at the scale of different beaches [e.g., [48,49,66-68]], along the coastal axis of a nesting beach [e.g., [26,44,69]] or along the vegetation to ocean axis [44,59]. The same behaviour has also been observed for female sea turtles nesting in several breeding seasons (remigration events) [26,28,48,67,70].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Hulin

Guillon

2007

BMC Evol Biol

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“…While the mean µ and standard deviation σ of this distribution are unknown, biologists strongly believe µ to be near 13 days (Dodd 1988;Talbert et al 1980). We , we may assume σ is near 0.75.…”

Section: Justification Of Prior Distributions and Beliefsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Limited-Information Modeling of Loggerhead Turtle Population Size

Grego

Hitchcock

2013

JABES

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We attempt to estimate the size of a population of female loggerhead turtles.In traditional capture-recapture experiments to estimate the size of an animal population, individual animals are tagged and the information about which individuals are captured repeatedly is crucial. For these loggerhead turtle data, information about individual turtles is not available. Rather, we observe only the counts of successful and failed nestings at a location over a series of days (in our case, three). We view the turtles' nesting behavior as an alternating renewal process, model it using parametric distributions, and then derive probability distributions that describe the behavior of the turtles during the three days via a 3-way contingency table. We adopt a Bayesian approach, formulating our model in terms of parameters about which strong prior information is available.We use a Gibbs sampling algorithm to sample from the posterior distribution of our random quantities, the most crucial of which is the number of turtles remaining offshore during the entire sampling period. We illustrate the method using a data set from loggerhead turtle sites along the South Carolina coast. 1We provide a simulation study which illustrates the quality and robustness of the method and investigates sensitivity to prior parameter specification.

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Nesting Activity of the Loggerhead Turtle (Caretta caretta) in South Carolina I: A Rookery in Transition

Cited by 42 publications

References 12 publications

Predicting nest survival in sea turtles: when and where are eggs most vulnerable to predation?

Predicting nest survival in sea turtles: when and where are eggs most vulnerable to predation?

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Limited-Information Modeling of Loggerhead Turtle Population Size

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