Survey Photos

When we go on Snorkel Survey, we go over to PIR (Teluk Puah), on Perhentian Besar.

http://go2travelmalaysia.com/tour_malaysia/images/perhentian_map.gif

Here there is a lot of sea grass which is the turtles main food source, so there are a lot of feeding turtles there. We kayak over from the village. When we see a turtle we free dive down and try to photograph the left side of the face, the right side of the face and the top of the turtle. The left and right side of the face is to determine individual. The top of the turtle is for determining gender as males have a long tail and the females have a very short tail often hard to see from above. Juveniles we can't sex as they don't mature and grow their tails if they are male til they are 15 years old. I have done quite a few surveys and I am starting to identify individuals who return weekly by certain markings or tags. These are some of my best shots I have taken so far: