Today is World Sea Turtle Day

This year marks the end of the 40-year period of the ΑΡΧΕΛΩΝ program aimed at saving the Caretta tortoise in Greece.

The continuous and successful actions of ARCHELON employees and volunteers have made it possible to come close to a kind of record, exceeding the world, for the longest reproductive period of a sea turtle: 36 years.

On the spawning beaches of Zakynthos, the Cypress and Laconian Gulfs, Koroni and Romanos of Messinia, Rethymno, Chania and the Gulf of Messara, groups of researchers and trained volunteers record the spawning of Caretta.

The ‘champion’ tortoise, code B2494, was tagged in 1986 in Zakynthos by trained ARCHELON volunteers, who since then have systematically recorded its presence every time it came ashore to lay its eggs. When this turtle was again found breeding in Zakynthos in the summer of 2022, it was the 36th egg-laying year and a world record for this species – the previous one was recorded for a loggerhead turtle in Florida (USA).

If this year the ARCHELON team of volunteers captures the same turtle nesting next year on the beach in Laganas bay in Zakynthos, the world record will be broken, highlighting the great importance of the systematically controlled population on the island.

At the Sea Turtle Rescue Center in Glyfada, Attica, ΑΡΧΕΛΩΝ staff and volunteers fight daily to save injured and sick turtles from all over Greece. Sea turtles are long-lived, but it is not known exactly how many years they live and how many years they are reproductively active. Tagging is a reliable method of identifying turtles that nest annually on beaches.

ARCHELON has been running a tagging program with trained volunteers since the early 1980s in Zakynthos and the Gulf of Cyprus. Each turtle has two tags so that if one is damaged, it can be replaced with a new one based on the second and not lose the identity of the turtle. Today, unfortunately, many turtles have destroyed both plastic and metal tags, and, as writes CNN Greece, their original identity has been lost.

In 2019, the ΑΡΧΕΛΩΝ research team searched a database of tags that had been placed on turtles over the years and found those that had been laying eggs for more than two decades, and two of them were “champions” with 33 years of reproductive life. In the summer of 2022, one of the “champions” with the code B2494 nested again in Zakynthos and completed 36 years of breeding, setting a world record.

Turtle B2494, like some others on Zakynthos, Kyparisiakos and Rethymnon, is now electronically tagged (PIT) so its identity will not be lost.

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