You might think living on an island of 0.06 square miles during a dive stand-down could get tedious, but my DRTO days have been astonishingly eventful.

We continued our turtle monitoring each day, on Loggerhead as well as on Garden Key and the smaller sandy keys. Luckily we didn’t find as much activity as we did that first day, but it was nevertheless exhausting, sweaty work. I’m getting more familiar with how to distinguish between the tracks of green and loggerhead turtles—loggers have more comma-shaped front flipper prints and crawl with an alternating gait, like a trotting horse, while greens have straighter, choppier strokes and move with both foreflippers at once. On slopes and turns, however, it can be difficult to distinguish between the two, and naturally our dear turtles move exclusively in turns and on slopes.

Ever hopeful of imminent stand-up (this is actually the official opposite of stand-down), we also scoped out potential dive sites using GIS and tide information, and prepped OSHA-mandated pony bottles, tiny auxiliary air tanks for out-of-air emergencies. We also wrote and revised emergency procedure documents and safe practices paperwork for the park to be completely ready to go at a moment’s notice. The long days at home after turtle walks gave us plenty of time to think about and enjoy our favorite mid-morning meals, second breakfast and first lunch.

Is it time for first lunch yet?

A USGS group has been here tagging turtles all season, and is at the stage of retrieving tags to download and process the collected data. Turtles nest several times during the nesting season, returning every few weeks, so they can track their movements and catch them after they come ashore to nest or rodeo them as they surface in the water. Their field mission had come to a close and two turtles with accelerometer tags still hadn’t returned, so USGS biologist Kristen Hart asked if Kayla, Ryan, Lee Qi and I could monitor East Key for the night and collect the accelerometers if the turtles came to nest. Tagged turtles are given unique names, and we were looking for Luly and Mossey, both loggerheads. The accelerometers measure turtle movements at an extremely fine scale—90 data points are collected per second—and are used to record the turtle’s behavior and movements during the nesting season. If not retrieved, the tags (which don’t come cheap) and all their data are lost when turtles naturally shed their scutes (the “scales” on their shells), so finding and retrieving them was extremely important to the project. If we found a turtle with an accelerometer we were instructed to record her movements to the second as she nested before removing the tag; this information would be used to help interpret the massive amount of accelerometer data. For this we synchronized our wristwatches to time.gov, a task that required an unanticipated level of agility and wit.

Marc and Lee Qi sure know how to put the “fun” in “Emergency Dive Operations Procedure.”

We then geared up for our scientific slumber party, packing red headlamps, snacks, and beanbag chairs and boat seat cushions for sleeping. As the sun went down, law enforcement officer Wayne Mitchell kindly took us out to East Key and dropped us off on the small sandy island. We divided the night into four two-hour shifts, during which the person on-duty would walk the perimeter of the island every half hour. As the brilliantly pink clouds faded into gray and before the half moon rose in the wee hours of the morning, the sky was lit only with the faint Fort Jefferson harbor light in the distance, occasional lightning in the distance, and the incredible multitude of stars. Lee Qi, on the first watch, quickly found a green turtle on the beach, and since Ryan and I had never seen a green nest before we headed over to watch. Turtles, greens especially, will spook easily and may false crawl if they see or hear people as they look for a nesting site and start digging, but can be closely approached as they lay their eggs provided we stay behind them and remain reasonably quiet. We kept our distance, turned off our lights, and hunkered down as quietly and motionlessly as possible to wait for the appropriate time to approach. Just as we started discussing in low whispers that it had been a while since we had heard digging and could probably try to sneak a peek, Kayla radioed that the green had crossed to the other side of the island to nest, and we realized that the dark lump we had been so assiduously and cautiously monitoring was actually a small bush. Luckily we were soon distracted from our embarrassment: within a few minutes, Kayla excitedly radioed that Mossey was on the beach! By the time we grabbed the corrals and came over, she had started to lay her eggs. We were able to approach close enough, always staying behind her so she couldn’t see us, to actually see the eggs dropping into the nest. Kayla meticulously recorded her every movement as sanctioned by time.gov.

Kayla scans the beach for any approaching turtles.

Abruptly, Mossey finished laying her eggs and started burying the nest. She first used her surprisingly dexterous rear flippers to delicately fill in the egg cavity for several minutes before incorporating her larger front flippers, vigorously spraying us with sand. As she turned to go, it was our time for action. Ryan and I grabbed the heavy corrals, hinged plastic squares that form a box around the turtle and are connected with plastic stakes. Loggerheads can weigh upward of 500 lbs and corralling can be a strenuous, frantic, and sandy activity. Luckily Mossey is on the smaller side and Ryan, Kayla, and I were quickly able to restrain her, but I could feel how strong she was as she lunged at the corral walls. Kayla removed the accelerometer with a hacksaw while we scraped off the barnacles growing on her carapace. Mossey alternated between doggedly straining at the corral and appearing to nap, emitting little grumbly turtle snores. We released her, cleaned and streamlined, and she hastily made for the water without so much as a backward glance.

Mossey rests in the corral. Part of the project procedure includes taking flash pictures of the turtles for identification purposes, so Kayla let me take a few after Mossey finished nesting. In general, however, it is best to refrain from flashing the turtles.

Triumphant, we returned to camp to get some sleep before our assigned watches. My walks between 1am and 2:30am were brilliantly illuminated by the moon, making my headlamp unnecessary. Patrolling every half hour means the tracks will be fresh, so we walk at the water’s edge and can quickly identify new tracks. On a few surveys I stopped at fresh tracks by the water’s edge, glanced up to follow them, and was startled by a turtle only a few feet away. I saw a few more greens making their way up the beach, but no Luly, who did not come nest that night. Between walks I would nestle into my boat cushion and life jacket pillow for a few minutes of sleep before heading out for the next round. Wayne came to pick us up around 6am, and as we packed up to leave a bold green crawled up right by our camp! Seemingly unperturbed by our loading activities, she continued to heave herself along the beach as we headed back to our waiting beds on Garden Key. Kristin is going to keep coming back in hopes of catching Luly, who is still in the DRTO area; meanwhile, Mossey is hightailing it to Mexico—you deserve it, girl! You can track Luly and Mossey (and the other DRTO sea turtles) at seaturtle.org.

This green turtle nonchalantly crawled through our camp as we packed up to leave at sunrise.

Delighted to be diving

In the last few days of my stay at the fort, we got word that we would be able to dive! We would follow OSHA standards as commercial divers, but could ignore the stipulations about outdated equipment per “accepted community standards.” There was much mirth and rejoicing. Briefed and checked out, laden with our pony bottles in addition to the dive flags, flashlights, data clipboards, lionfish spears, and buckets we needed for data and lionfish collection, we were overheated and clumsy in the boat and oddly balanced in the water, but we were diving! Per OSHA standards we conducted the lionfish surveys with one buddy team in the water and two people topside, one Designated Person In Charge and one fully geared standby diver. For the surveys, one diver would carry the spear and a bucket to hold the lions, and the other carried a clipboard to record the time, depth, habitat type, and behavior of each lionfish captured. He or she would also time the survey with a stopwatch, stopping the clock from the second the lion was spotted to the time the search resumed. They’re using shorter spears here, which make it easier to nab lions in tight spots, and I’m getting handier with headshots. We were even treated to a day of the perfectly calm weather we had been so loathe to miss last week. It was pure joy to skim along flat water in a fast boat, the only movement on the surface the ripples of flying fish skipping out of the way of our bow.

Loggerhead Key floats on perfectly flat water.

On the way to our dive sites a small pod of dolphins, mothers and juveniles, graced us with a visit. They approached us and came right under the boat but declined our offer to play in our wake. They definitely brought us good luck—when Ryan and I went in we caught a record fourteen lions! Sitting topside was a pleasure as well: there is nothing so peaceful as floating on quiet water, circles of placid bubbles telling you your friends are happily breathing below the surface.

Back at the dock we would record initial data for our catch. In such a remote location with our supply of groceries dwindling by the end of the stay, there’s no sense in wasting a source of free protein, so the DRTO interns put an additional step in lionfish processing: measure, weigh, fillet. Carefully avoiding the venomous spines, we filleted our larger catches, throwing scraps and skins to the three goliath groupers that lurk under the dock, knowing that the fish cleaning station means free meals. Gut content analysis was left for a potential future bad weather day, a decision to which I was not opposed. Over the next few nights we enjoyed grilled lionfish and fresh lionfish ceviche.

Fourteen lions, not a bad haul.

USGS biologist Kristin Hart excavates the loggerhead nest while Lee Qi sorts the nest contents.

To round out my turtle nesting experience, I also jumped at the chance to accompany Kristin to excavate a hatched loggerhead nest. Three days after someone observes hatchlings or their tracks, the nest is excavated to collect data on how many eggs were laid, how many didn’t hatch and why, any evidence of predation, as well as to release any lagging hatchlings. We returned to East Key, which in the daylight resembles a sandy pincushion so crammed is it with PVC-marked turtle nests. Kristin expertly dug through to the nest, and found two tiny hatchlings, while Lee Qi sorted the hatched shells and pipped eggs (hatchlings unable to make it out of the egg shell). We packed the hatchlings in wet sand and took them home with us to be released from Garden Key later in the evening. This turtle was productive—she laid at least 116 eggs. Kristin collected the yolks of the ten unhatched eggs to be taken back to the lab for study. There is still ongoing research on how the Deepwater Horizon spill is affecting turtle nesting, and Kristin explained that DRTO essentially acts as a control site since it’s far from the spill.

I’m getting into the swing of things here with turtle protocol and the fort routine, which must mean it’s time to move on. It will be interesting to see how the stand-down has affected the rest of the National Parks that I’ll visit. I’m glad that I was in DRTO with so many terrestrial projects going on, and also that my being here permitted everyone else to dive—with the rotating schedule, Kayla doesn’t always have the requisite four people for an OSHA commercial dive team (three-person dive teams are permitted if the diver is tethered to the boat, but this is impractical and even dangerous for hunting lionfish in complex habitat). We were lucky: in parks with smaller dive programs they might not be able to dive at all or get any work done until this gets sorted out. Thank you so much to Tracy Ziegler for coordinating my stay, Kayla for supervising me and doing everything she could to get us in the water, and everyone at the fort, particularly my fellow terns. You guys are awesome, and I hope you get to dive!

After saying goodbye to Mike Feeley and Lee Richter in Miami, I hopped on a flight to Key West to start the next leg of my journey to the Dry Tortugas. I had been to Key West once before this January, for a field trip on the SEA vessel Corwith Cramer, and I can confidently confirm that the fake people standing atop the airport are even more disconcerting at night. Dry Tortugas National Park lionfish interns Ryan Lind and Lee Qi picked me up from the airport and brought me to Key West government housing. Everyone at Dry Tortugas (which those in the know refer to by its NPS abbreviation DRTO, pronounced “dirt-o”) works a ten days on, four days off schedule, and Ryan and Lee Qi were in the middle of their time off. We would have the next day in Key West to get groceries and pack, and would head out on the ferry early the following morning.

After a Publix run and poaching wifi from the tiny Key West Public Library, we went sightseeing: after determining that the Hemingway house tour was outside the scope of our intern budget, Ryan and I visited Fort Zachary Taylor State Park and associated beach. Fort Zach served as a teaser to my next ten days, as its design and construction are nearly identical to those of DRTO’s Fort Jefferson, albeit on a much smaller scale. Afterward we met up with Lee Qi for some people watching on Duval Street before heading to Mallory Square for the sunset celebration. As we stood entranced by the contradictory incantations of the French Canadian Cat Man, I got a call from the ferry announcing that due to a steering problem we wouldn’t be going out the next morning. The interns needed to use this as a work day for data entry, so under the supervision of DRTO Biological technician Kayla Nimmo we headed to the NOAA-Mote Marine Eco Discovery Center for a work space. While they worked I did some eco discovering, and Lee Qi lent me her bike to check out the Key West Aquarium. That night, Ryan sautéed some lionfish they had brought home from the park. I hadn’t gotten to try it in Biscayne and have nothing but positive reviews. Seafood doesn’t get much more sustainable than this!

Fort Zachary Taylor State Park, Key West FL

The next morning, the ferry Yankee Freedom II was up and steering so at dawn we loaded our dive gear and coolers of groceries. As we clustered around a table and chatted to the crew, a flood of visitors in various stages of snorkel preparedness filled both decks of the ferry. After two and a half hours of open water, the brick walls of Fort Jefferson appeared on the horizon. This Civil War-era fort would be my home for the next ten days.

Fort Jefferson

Dry Tortugas National Park is almost too beautiful. I’m living in a cliché of soft white sand and turquoise waters, with sunsets that set the fort’s brick walls ablaze. Spanish explorer Don Juan Ponce de Leon discovered this collection of seven islands in 1513 and named them for the abundance of sea turtles he found there. The “Dry” clarification was added later to warn sailors that the islands lack a source of fresh water. Incorporated into the United States with the Louisiana Purchase, the islands were clearly a strategic fortress area for their location and natural protected harbors. Construction of Fort Jefferson began in 1840 on Garden Key, and the still incomplete fort became a Union stronghold during the Civil War, used to cut off supplies to the South. Never fired upon, it became a military prison for Union deserters. The fort’s most famous prisoner was Dr. Samuel Mudd, whom fellow non-history majors may recognize, as I did, primarily from Nicolas Cage explaining the origin of the phrase “his name is mud” in the classic film National Treasure 2. Dr. Mudd set John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg after Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln, and while his degree of involvement in the conspiracy is unclear, he was sentenced to life imprisonment at Fort Jefferson. After an initial rocky start involving an abortive escape attempt Dr. Mudd rose to the ranks of Most Valuable Prisoner after his heroic assistance with a Yellow Fever outbreak and was eventually pardoned and freed. Franklin Delano Roosevelt pronounced the fort a National Monument in 1935, and the surrounding rich ecological resources were also protected in 1992 when the area became a National Park. Due in large part to its remoteness—the closest land is Key West, 70 miles away—the area is a haven for birds and marine life, with biodiversity and abundance that provide the same glimpse into the past as the historically preserved fort. For the last month everyone has been telling me how wonderful and healthy the reefs are here compared to the relative desolation of the VI and Biscayne, and as we arrived I was itching to get into the water.

Modeled after British castles, the entire fort is surrounded by a moat. Allegedly it hosts a resident crocodile, but I have yet to see him.

As we bustled about unloading the ferry, transferring our belongings to our fort housing, and preparing our dive gear, Kayla approached us with somber news. Following a dive incident involving rebreather equipment malfunction last November (from which thankfully everyone fully recovered), the National Park Service had issued a scientific diving stand-down, effective that morning and holding until the NPS scientific diving policy was rewritten and approved, and individual park dive programs underwent the necessary changes and training to resume diving. Kayla explained that the possible way around it would be to dive under the stricter regulations for government commercial diving, but until we were trained and approved and had all the necessary equipment for commercial dives, there would be no diving in DRTO. Crestfallen, we looked longingly at beautiful conditions—no wind and the sea glass to the horizon, the first such good weather the other interns had seen all season. While we of course recognized the importance of revising the dive policy to avoid future incidents and keep everyone safe, we couldn’t help but feel disappointed and indignant about the timing. As I’ve seen over and over in the past month, the vagaries of weather and technology make field days precious. Losing good weather days in the height of research season was a blow, not just because diving is more fun than office work but also because it limits data collection and may keep projects from completion. The stand-down may last anywhere from a few weeks to months, likely throwing a wrench into science diving programs across the National Park system.

Sea turtle intern Marc Fruitema, Ryan, Biological technician Kayla Nimmo, and lionfish intern Lee Qi can barely contain their excitement about OSHA regulations.

Kayla was incredibly on top of doing everything she could to get us commercial dive certified. Within the hour she was inventorying the equipment we would need and collecting anything that needed to be inspected or serviced, and she spent the next day putting together our training course and exam. We picked up sea turtle intern Marc Fruitemi from his housing on Loggerhead Key, and spent the afternoon immersed in the delights of OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) regulations. We all of course passed the certification test with flying colors, but were again stymied as subsequent communications revealed that although for purposes of practicality the NPS usually ignores outdated OSHA standards that require the use of specific equipment that is now no longer manufactured or serviced, for the stand-down we would need to be strictly OSHA-compliant and thus lacked the mandated equipment to dive.

Determined not to squander the gorgeous weather and our limited time in the park, your plucky team of ‘terns scouted out shallow sites to hunt lionfish via snorkeling and free diving. I had never officially tried free diving before other than short dips while snorkeling, and was eager to give it a whirl. We went to check out some isolated coral heads, or as we call them, “nubbins,” in 20-40 feet of water. The visibility wasn’t great, so on my first foray in it felt a bit like going down the rabbit hole to swim blindly through clouds of particulate until suddenly the reef sprang into view, vibrant and clear. There is something magical about moving silent and unencumbered through the water on a free dive, experiencing the world below in brief vignettes. I’m not sure I’m completely sold, though—I do enjoy breathing! What is certain is that DRTO lives up to the hype: this is fish heaven. Here are all the missing snappers and groupers from the VI, and they’re enormous. Curious red groupers come right up to us, and on a few sites I was ecstatic to come face to face with a goliath grouper. Five hundred pounds of fleshy, thick-lipped, beady-eyed fishy goodness—what could possibly be more lovable?

A goliath grouper moseys by the Garden Key dock.

The DRTO lionfishers have been using timed surveys to collect data on catch per unit effort, and unfortunately free diving wasn’t compatible with this survey type. We weren’t able to systematically look for lionfish, it was difficult to estimate the timing, and with poor visibility we couldn’t see one another well enough for safe diving. We sadly concluded that free diving would not be the answer.

Fortunately, there’s plenty of work to be done on land. The Dry Tortugas continue to live up to their name as a hotspot for sea turtle nesting. The park is trying to make Loggerhead Key an index beach for loggerhead turtles, which means it must be monitored daily. Marc usually patrols the island in the mornings but is on a different 10-4 rotation than Ryan and Lee Qi, so on his lieu days we would take over. Marking nests is a more casual affair here than in Biscayne since there are so many and raccoons aren’t an issue. Rather than digging up each nest to confirm eggs and covering it with screens, we simply mark each possible nest with a PVC pipe stake identifying the nest with the date, species, and likelihood of a nest on a scale of 1 (a false crawl, which doesn’t merit a stake) to 6 (when the observer sees the turtle laying the eggs). Stakes are also marked with colored tape indicating the month and week of laying to quickly identify nests that may have hatched. We record the GPS coordinates of each nest, and keep track of how nests have been affected by waves, other turtle activity, and invasive plants like Australian Pine. Also unlike Biscayne, it’s easier to find nests and false crawls here because turtles leave identifiable tracks on the continuous sandy beaches, and lots of them: on our first morning we found eleven nests! This was an unusual amount of activity, but this has been a record year so far, and patrolling for turtles is never a quick stroll along the beach. The expansive sand seems to encourage some particularly finicky turtles to travel up, down, and across the beach in meandering turns and loops, sometimes digging several cavities before nesting.

You can’t swing a cat on this island without hitting turtle tracks.

Following their tracks in and out of the water can be quite a trek, and as the blinding sun rises higher in the sky we aren’t above berating the turtles for their incompetent nesting. The heavy turtle activity adds a quasi-forensic air to the walk as we attempt to discern who nested where. As turtles deliberately mask their tracks as they cover their nests, and often cross and mask other turtles’ tracks in the process, this can be a difficult task! On the eleven-nest day especially we spent nearly as much time puzzling as we did walking. As we head out and load the boat we usually take a few minutes to watch the tarpon and cobia that cut sharp lines through the swirling bait ball surrounding the dock, now and then abruptly accelerating into silvery attack.

A tarpon surfaces by the Loggerhead dock.

We’re eagerly awaiting updates about the stand-down and crossing our fingers that we’ll be able to find a way to dive! In the meantime, we have plenty of crazy turtles to keep us busy, sunrises and sunsets to watch, and another week of fort life ahead.

Despite a huge removal effort a few years ago, invasive Australian Pine still litters the beaches.