Oceans of change

00:06 Melissa: So this looks like a Hawksbill track because there's some alternating flipper marks and we know that...

00:16 Tiahni: That's Dr Melissa Staines, a marine biologist who studies turtles. We're in a very remote island off the Kimberley, off the very top of Western Australia. 

00:25 Melissa: I was thinking those little tracks that go up. You have to have good eyes looking for hatchling tracks.

00:31 Tiahni: We've been scouring the beach looking for turtle hatchling tracks that might lead us to the location of a turtle nest. You'll hear from Melissa a lot in this episode as we quite literally traverse the continent looking for and talking about turtles. Like a lot of marine species, they're being adversely affected by climate change. Melissa is trying to figure out how turtles here in Wunambul Gaambera Country, an important area for nesting turtles, are faring.

Climate change disproportionately affects the ocean warming, acidification, algal blooms, rising sea levels and coral bleaching are all affecting marine ecosystems and coastal areas. While the atmosphere experiences significant warming, the ocean absorbs a vast majority of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases and also absorbs a whopping 30% of global human-produced carbon dioxide. This leads to a range of severe and interconnected impacts that are unique to the marine environment and often less visible.

Climate change is here. And you've heard all about what that means? Warmer temperatures, extreme weather and biodiversity loss. But what about biodiversity as a solution in and of itself? This podcast is about where nature and climate change intersect. Join us as we traverse the back roads of this magnificent continent. Finding the stories of hope that we all need right now. I'm Tianhi Adamson and this is Big Sky Country, a podcast by Bush Heritage.

Oceans. They make up 70% of the Earth's surface. They drive our weather systems and are fundamental to life on Earth. Whatever we do on land affects the sea. We couldn't look at the intersection of climate change and biodiversity without visiting the ocean. So join us as we take a deep dive into the marine species affected by climate change. Look at the solutions we can find in the ocean and learn how this big blue resilience machine holds stories of hope. Here's Melissa again.

03:04 Melissa: So my PhD and my background has been pretty much exclusively with sex determination and turtles and in climate change.

03:12 Tiahni: Turtles have worked hard as a species to survive for over 120 million years. They're hardy, but humans keep throwing stuff at them and climate change is one of those things.

03:24 Melissa: So sea turtles have temperature dependent sex determination, which means that the embryo when it's in the egg will have a mechanism that switches and turns the hatchling either into a female or a male based on the temperature of the sand in which it's being incubated. And with climate change we see that with warming temperatures, the warm temperatures produce more females and cool temperatures would normally produce more males. And the best way to remember is hot chicks and cool dudes.

03:59 Tiahni: As you all know, the climate is warming, and however much we want to see more females in the world - yeah, the girls - the imbalance could cause a potential catastrophe for turtles.

04:09 Melissa: They aren't able to adapt fast enough and so the concern is that we might see populations of turtles around the world, particularly that are close to the equator, have feminising populations.

04:26 Tiahni: On the largest Green Turtle rookery in the world on Raine Island in the northern Great Barrier Reef, there's a hatchling ratio that's over 99% female. As Melissa explains, extreme sex ratios could be detrimental to the reproductive success of a population.

04:44 Melissa: There's just likely to be not enough males for those adult females to be able to breed with successfully and fertilise all of the eggs.

04:56 Tiahni: Species like turtles and whales have been around for millions of years, outliving the dinosaurs. They are big travellers and they know no boundaries. So inspired by the migratory behaviour of whales and turtles in this episode, we're on a journey from the Timor Sea off the Kimberley coast to the central east Queensland turtle friendly town of Agnes Waters, right down to the humpback Highway off the east coast of Australia and to the seagrass meadows of Southern Australia. It's a long way, but it pales in comparison to the thousands of kilometres that a turtle can travel in a year.

05:34 Melissa: Some turtles that do nest in Western Australia travel all the way back to a foraging site in northern Queensland. And so the things that we do in our little local beach area has a big impact on the turtles that go back and forage in somewhere like Fiji or Papua New Guinea or somewhere else in Australia. And so it's all connected.

05:58 Tiahni: I'm a Kaurareg woman. My ancestry is from Zendikars - the Torres Strait Islands. And my totem is the waru, or in English a sea turtle. Of course, that makes me curious as to the broader cultural context of this work. We need to understand a bit about Wunambal Gaambera Country and specifically the deep connection that exists here in the Kimberley between people and place. After all, the rangers here are guided by millennia-old lessons in caring for country, their custodians and the turtles here rely on them.

06:29 Desmond: The salt water country is very special to us. When our mob live off the salt water... Most of our stories come from the land and the salt water.

06:39 Tiahni: That's Desmond Williams. He's a senior Uunguu Ranger and Traditional Owner with Wunambal Gaambera. His family has been caring for this country for generations.

06:50 Desmond: All this is my big backyard. So even the islands are very significant for us. My grandfather's people, they didn't just stay in one place. Then say one place in one place they are, they are whether like fishing or not, and then they cook all right and...

07:12 Tiahni: There are 200 islands over Wunambal Gaambera saltwater country or Wundaagu, and there are several thousands in the Kimberley, a result of geological processes, particularly the rise of sea levels after the last Ice Age. Des's grandfather travelled from Island to Island in a dugout canoe. That's pretty impressive, especially considering the scale of this place - over 1,000,000 hectares of sea country.

07:36 Desmond: Dead and you're big. and then then you use the tide to try to come back. They didn't have map or GPS or compass where the stars.

07:51 Tiahni: If you didn't quite hear that, Des said, they'd go out and hunt, then use the tide to come back. No motors, no GPS, no map, no compass. Just the stars. To Kaurareg people, turtles are called waru, as I said before. They hold a special cultural and spiritual importance. It's the same here for Wunambal Gaambera people. So I'm curious to learn more about what they're doing to look after turtles nowadays.

08:18 Speaker 3: Yeah, probably hasn't occurred. They round here pretty good yeah? We did a recent kayaking, about two years ago.

08:27 Tiahni: And his team of rangers and ecologists tagged several turtles in 2023. One lost its satellite tag, one ended up in Queensland and another in Indonesia. And this all forms part of ongoing monitoring to get a better understanding of turtle behaviour.

So next Dr Mel and the Rangers and the team headed out to Troughton Island off the Kimberley coast. Known in language as Waberi, it's about 80 km north-west of Kalumburu and less than 500 km from Timor lest. It's small, less than one square kilometre flat and mostly treeless, with a small airstrip in the middle. The team don't travel in a dugout canoe like Dez's ancestors, but on a little 6-seater plane. As the team fly in Mel spots hundreds of juvenile Green Sea Turtles foraging on the reef having a munch on some algae and seagrass. The reefs are feeding grounds for these juvenile turtles, but the little hatchlings aren't always so lucky. Sinister, but these same reefs are often referred to as the Sea of mouths.

09:39 Tabitha: It's pretty amazing being out here. Yeah. It's really special place for us, has a beautiful beach where a lot of turtles come up.

09:49 Tiahni: That's Tabby or Tabitha Cowan - Wunambal Gaambera woman and an Unguu Ranger. Caring for country comes naturally to her, and she's learned a lot from Des and her own ranger father, Jeremy.

10:01 Tabitha: I am a full time ranger. I have been for about 5 years. Basically my work is all about monitoring the country and looking after the whole of Wunambal Gaambera Country. Today we're at Chardon Island. We came in this morning to have a look. If we can see any turtle tracks and see some hatchlings. But haven't seen any...

10:25 Tiahni: The team trudge up and down the crunchy Shelly Beach, looking for signs of turtles. It's really hot. There's just been a heat wave in the Kimberley with record-breaking August winter temperatures of 42°. These islands are prime nesting sites for turtles and for them, climate change doesn't just mean hot days.

10:46 Melissa: And so, because we're seeing rising sea levels, it's pushing the turtles to have to nest further back and...  on the mainland beaches that shouldn't be too problematic because there's a lot of land behind them that they can retreat to. But for the islands where you've got sandy beaches, but then a very steep cliff and with sea level rise, they don't have any space to retreat back because it's just a cliff. So that's probably going to be problematic within the next 20 to 30 years as we're seeing rapid sea-level rise. So it's really important that we're monitoring that as well.

11:25 Tiahni: The Rangers are working hard to monitor the situation. They've set up a project to find out more.

11:31 Tom: The Wunambal Gaambera Healthy Country Plan has turtles - they're one of the 10 important things in the plan. There's six species that are in the waters and four species that nest on islands.

11:44 Tiahni: This is Dr Tom Vigilante. He's a Healthy Country Manager for Bush Heritage and he works with the Wunambal Gaambera team. 

11:51 Tom: And we had an opportunity to apply for a Commonwealth grant looking at the effects of climate change on marine turtles, and that's what's funded this particular project. We've called it the Mudra Mire Turtle project, which is all about the Flatback Turtle in particular, and the effects of changing temperatures on their nesting.

12:13 Tiahni: The grant will allow the team to understand just how vulnerable these turtle populations are to climate change.

12:19 Tom: In other parts of Australia they're trialling things like putting sprinklers on nests and putting shade structures on nesting beaches to cool the sand. Here it's very remote, so we're we're exploring other options. And we're also putting temperature loggers into the sand at some locations to monitor the temperature of the sand at the depth that the turtles nest, and to see how how the temperatures are fluctuating through the year and being affected by heat waves and things like.

12:47 Tiahni: The loggers only work if they're always doing their job and they're checked regularly.

12:52 Tom: Yeah, it's very hard work.

12:57 Tiahni: The hard Yaka you're currently hearing is Tom digging out a logger, which monitors the temperature of the sand at a depth the mamma turtle digs to.

13:05 Tom: It's only 50 cm deep.

13:07 Tiahni: Considering his struggles here, it's safe to say mama turtle's got a slight edge on Tom in the digging department.

13:13 Tom: We're getting to that last bit. That's the hardest. And if you get lazy and just pull on the string, the string snaps and then you can't find it.

13:21 Jill: You did a good job of getting it down there.

13:24 Tom: Yeah. Well, we had a shovel.

13:28 Tiahni: Today it's a mixed result. Some of the loggers have been doing their job, but one cheeky turtle seems to have dug one up, looking for a place to nest. It goes to show how detail-dependent this research is. But it's the best way to understanding warming patterns. Like a lot of field work, it's all in the balance between the minutiae of data collection and the ability to see the bigger picture. For now, we're after the bigger picture. The work happening in the Kimberley contributes to that broader understanding of how turtles are affected by climate change. But as we've learned, they travel long distances and their path can be unpredictable. So we're headed to Queensland. Another place we know they like to nest, just beyond Bush Heritage's Reedy Creek Reserve, where teams of volunteers spend vast stretches of time monitoring turtle nests.

We've come here with a renewed focus on turtle hatchlings, though this isn't specifically a Bush Heritage project, the work to protect Reedy Creek has a direct impact on turtle nesting locations. The country here is very different. Long sandy beaches meet thick coastal melaleuca forests. This also happens to be Mel's home state, where she learned her turtle tracking skills.

14:45 Mel: Yeah. And what you're looking for is, like really soft, fluffy sand that's freshly been kicked up and covered over the top of the nest.

14:54 Tiahni: We're in search of established nesting sites, but soon enough Mel finds something else.

14:59 Mel: So a little - the little tracks. Yeah. Yeah. So that's a big hatchling run. We've got all these little tracks and they're going straight towards the ocean. And it looks like there might have been some more overnight maybe? 

15:15 Tiahni: It's an understatement to say that these tiny, vulnerable critters are really up against it from the first few moments of their little turtle lives.

15:23 Mel: The odds are not great, essentially. Yeah, we don't know the true number, but there's the number that gets tossed around a lot, like one in 1000 make it to adulthood. So this green turtle that laid this clutch of eggs, she might lay 5-6 clutches across the whole season. That's only maybe 5-6 hundred, 700 eggs. So out of all of that egg laying maybe not even one of her eggs will actually become a hatchling, and then even make it to adulthood, because that's still under that ratio.

15:58 Tiahni: What makes these adorable, vulnerable creatures so vulnerable is also what makes them resilient. With a survival rate like that, they have to do everything in their little turtle hearts to make it to the water, then face the dangers that lurk above and below. Add on microplastics, boat strikes and fishing activity, you wonder how any turtle makes it.

16:19 Mel: The hatchlings need to work as a group collectively to move the sand that's above their heads to beneath them and work like a conveyor belt. So the hatchlings at the very front are working the hardest to move all that compacted sand underneath them and then the hatchlings underneath that take that sand and move it underneath. Sometimes when you come out and check nests, you might even see little turtle noses sticking out of the sand. Just really, really cute. And they're all kind of huddled together and their eyes are closed because they're literally sleeping because they've been working so hard digging, you know, maybe 50-60 cm to get to the surface. They've been working really, really hard and they've got all this lactic acid built up in their muscles so they need to rest.

Tiahni: Then there's all the predators. The nest eggs are preyed on by goannas looking for some breakfast and feasted on by introduced foxes, the latter of which are a priority to manage by the Bush Heritage team, with the local community. We find plenty of evidence to suggest foxes have been out just last night. If the turtles manage to make it this far, they're under the attack of birds picking them off from the sky like little stealth bombers, or from ghost crabs emerging from their holes to ambush and eat them. If they're lucky enough to hit the water, they're tumbled about by a wild ocean current and preyed upon by sharks. More seabirds, fish and in some places, crocodiles.

17:43 Mel: Odds are you're less likely to get picked off if there's so many of you, which is probably the strategy of why turtles lace so many eggs is that most of them should survive, and that you want as many of them to run the beach at the same time so that one or two can make it to the edge of the reef flat or to the edge of where there's no more predators and actually make it to the the currents.

18:05 Tiahni: This journey, they face the ups and downs, the trials of predation and struggle. It's deeply touching. It's a story of strength. The more we can promote the success of these eggs and the hatchlings, the more of a chance we're giving these turtles for when they face up to this exhaustive list of threats. We keep wandering the beach, looking for the next nest. We're joined by Lisa del Riccio, local turtle monitoring champion with the Agnes Water Turtle Group, checking for recently emerged nests for hatchling success. Lisa has been trained and authorised for this activity and while we encourage you to be on the lookout for turtle tracks, nests must not be touched or disturbed.

18:47 Lisa: So Lisa's checking the nest and we've just found a dead baby Loggerhead. And do you know why you think it would have died?

19:01 Mel: Sometimes, if he wasn't able to come up to the surface with the rest of the hatchlings, maybe he's from like the night previous, and so he was just stuck in that top surface sand.

19:13 Tiahni: We'll never know exactly why this little turtle died, but it is the fate of many. We do know the warming trend caused by climate change is affecting hatchling mortality rates as well as sex determination and a heat wave recently came through this part of Queensland. As sad as this hatchling death is, I was looking down at the reality for the vast majority of turtles.

19:37 Mel: I've seen the same turtle try multiple times to try to build a nest. Like she's got half a back flipper missing. She's probably 50-60-70 years old. She's been doing this for a long time. You know she knows the gig. But even still, after failing a few times, she doesn't give up hope straight away. She keeps going. I don't know, it's just really inspiring. So these ancient ocean mariners, that have seen so much out there.

20:11 Tiahni: This little dead turtle is not just a reminder of their struggle as a species, but it's also a reminder of why that mother turtle never gives up. They have an incredible ability to face up to those terrible odds and try and try and try.

20:26 Mel: I feel very passionate about caring for turtles because they've done such a good job so far. We can't give up on them like they haven't given up. And they're just extremely, extremely resilient.

20:40 Tiahni: I feel like everyone's saying resilient this resilient, that at the moment. But when I hear it from Mel's mouth in the early morning sun, just risen, walking along the beach with sand between our toes, looking for turtle nests, it hits different. On top of all the natural threats we mentioned earlier, us humans and all our rough and rowdy ways - whether it's climate change, microplastics, light pollution or overfishing, to name a few - these turtles are still trudging along in spite of it all. If that's not resilience, I don't know what it is. The thick shell says it all. It's also a reminder of just how resilient the entire ocean is. We'll come back to Agnes Waters later and as much as I love turtles, they're not the only species demonstrating resilience in the ocean.

21:33 Vanessa: Whales are a beautiful example of how we can demonstrate climate change in terms of its potential impact on the ocean and what it means for a particular animal that lives in the sea.

21:45 Tiahni: This is Vanessa Pirrota. She's a whale scientist, superstar of STEM, Wildlife Conservation Biologist and the ultimate guide to humpback whales. What's the link? Whales, ocean, climate... what's the go?

21:59 Vanessa: So when we talk about climate change, it's all doom and gloom. Ohh the world is getting hotter. Ohh, it's all sad things and well yeah, it's kind of like that. But I'm seeing whales as that hope. OK, let me explain. That's right, listeners, be prepared. This is a podcast where your minds will be blown to whale size proportion. So whales right now they'll go...

22:20 Tiahni: Vanessa is an infectious spirit and she does have some good news, but whales, like the rest of us, have encountered some potentially existential threats off the back of a changing climate. And one of those has to do with their main food source, Antarctic krill. Whales spent the summer months in Antarctica, gorging on these tiny morsels of deliciousness in preparation for a big trip north.

Vanessa: If we have the world warming up because of the activity we do, climate change means that the climate's changing, but also we're trapping heat in the ocean, heat in the atmosphere. That's going to melt Antarctic ice, which means the homes of Antarctic krill will be lost. Which means if you're a whale and you rely on this krill, you might not have whale food anymore.

23:10 Tiahni: A 2019 study in the Nature Climate Journal found that krill populations have shifted the centre of their distribution South by 275 miles in the past 40 years. This, of course, means less food for our whale friends.

23:25 Vanessa: Our marine giants like whales, humpback whales. They will travel from Antarctica along the coast, along that Humpback Hwy. which is blubber to blubber full of whales at this time here and then they go all the way to the warmer waters where they'll reproduce. I call it the whale disco.

23:42 Tiahni: This binary lifestyle, bookended by epic summer gorges in Antarctica and a trip north in the winter for reproduction isn't necessarily changing. There is evidence to suggest, however, that humpback whales are figuring out a simple workaround, and it involves food stops.

23:59 Vanessa: Whales are resilient. Hmm. They're adaptable, and that's maybe why we're seeing supplementary feeding of humpback whales in Australian waters before they head back to Antarctica. So they can go 'Well. I kind of need to feed. So I'm going to take a chance, kind of like me going from Sydney to Canberra. There happens to be a healthy option along the way I'm just going to pull in and have something there.

24:23 Tiahni: It is a simple story of supply and demand fuelled by necessity. And it demonstrates that whales can change their habits, even if those habits have been around for as long as whales have been around.

24:34 Vanessa: Humpback whales, their movements will be dictated by their biological needs to reproduce, the changes in the ocean, there must be temperature changes in Antarctica. I'm not exactly sure as a scientist what it is that tells the whales that it's time to head north. But if we have changes in the environment, we may start to see some changes to migration timing - when and where they occur - and the opportunities that they exploit in the oceans such as that of feeding opportunities that wouldn't necessarily be happening. But now we're seeing happening in Australian waters regularly. And they also have cultural transmission. Which means that overtime they will return to places they'll share knowledge and behaviours that they can adapt. Very important. So are they feeding in Australian waters as well because they just do it for fun? Or are they having to do it because of the climatic changes?

25:32 Tiahni: Vanessa has done a lot of work trying to figure out the answer to this question because it could say something about that beautiful little thing called adaptability. It's a word that's come up a lot in this season of Big Sky Country and it will come up again. How much and how quickly, are animals able to adapt to a changing climate and subsequently, how can we help them adapt?

25:53 Vanessa: My theory of why whales are feeding here so often, or at least why we're seeing it. More could be a combination of things. There's obviously greater effort. We have social media, we have drones, people are going, hey, Vanessa, have you seen this? And I'm going. 'Hey, what did you just see?' So it could have been happening, but I really strongly think that there are changes going on in the environment, whether it be those environmental changes like warming or conditions that are favourable for whales to be exploiting food here in Australian waters.

26:24 Tiahni: Now I want to go even deeper into the science of climate change in the ocean. After whales feed, whether it's in Antarctica or off of Sydney, their faeces have a monumental impact on all life, including ours.

26:36 Vanessa: Whales are important to every one of us, so if you're eating a lunch right now, you might be eating your lunch, and I'm going to tell you that whales may have helped in the food that you're eating because they feed in one area by eating krill and then poo in another. They fertilise the ocean. But if we miss that link of a keystone species it's a big impact on the whole ocean, right? And it's not just, we're not just talking about sea-level rising and homes lost for people, this is the livelihoods of whales.

27:02 Tiahni: This brings forth one more topic I want to cover in this episode, and that's blue carbon. Not only do whales fertilise the ocean with their poo, which promotes the growth of phyto-plankton forming the basis for marine food webs, they themselves are a source of carbon. 

Vanessa: Some whales in the Arctic, like the Bowhead Whale, can live over 200 years of age. Now this means that whales have the ability to sequester carbon.

27:28 Tiahni: It's the same idea for all living things. We're all carbon stores, but whales keep that carbon stored for much longer than most species and require less resources than, say, humans. And they're massive. This combination of factors makes for lengthy carbon sequestration, and we really need that. I'd like to delve a little deeper into blue carbon, and it turns out Adelaide is the place to go for that. So I packed my bags and went to meet my friend Doctor Alice Jones.

28:00 Alice Jones: So blue carbon in its kind of original definition includes all of the carbon that's stored both in the ocean, so in the water and the things that live in the water, and at the coasts.

28:12 Tiahni: Alice is a resilience ecologist at the University of Adelaide. Yep, that word again. She focuses on nature-based solutions to climate change, and while she did do her PhD on marine megafauna, including whales, I've come to talk to her about plants in the ocean.

28:29 Alice: Per hectare, blue carbon ecosystems store on average at least twice what a terrestrial forest ecosystem would store.

28:38 Tiahni: These ecosystems Alice speaks of include mangroves, seagrass meadows, and kelp forests. She's a seagrass restoration expert.

28:47 Alice: When we talk about coastal blue carbon ecosystems, we're talking about seagrass meadows, which are basically like grassy meadows that exist under the sea. So they are flowering plants that live under the sea. And so they perform like any other flowering plant that we see on land, they have seeds and they have flowers, but it all just happens underwater. 

29:18 Tiahni: In many ways, the process for marine plants is identical to that on land. But when it comes to storing carbon, environmental conditions in the water are ideal.

29:19 Alice: So plants are usually about 50% carbon. Humans are about 20% carbon. Fish have a lot of carbon in them. Plankton have a lot of carbon in them. So all these little dead bits of old fish and bits of seaweed and stuff that are floating around in the ocean, they often get deposited in these environments because they get trapped by the roots and the leaves and the slow flow of water, and then they get buried in the sediment and that's how the carbon gets built up. And because the soil is wet, it changes the chemistry. So it means that when the carbon is buried in the sediments there, it doesn't get broken down by microbes as much because there's not as much oxygen in the soils, and the soils are salty and they form these really, really deep rich carbon stores that can be, you know, like metres deep and thousands of years old.

30:13 Tiahni:  When we dredge the ocean floor and disrupt coastal ecosystems, all that precious carbon gets released into the atmosphere. This has sadly occurred on a mass scale all over the world. So in comes Alice with a restoration expertise. Just like on land, there are times when nature can rebuild itself with little intervention. For Alice and the team, removing man-made structures that separate the coast from the ocean is often enough to promote sufficient recovery for these ecosystems. But other times call for a more interventionist approach. The team put on their gumboots and restore seagrass meadows by hand. An example of this work is in Adelaide's Port River.

30:49 Alice: So it's in an area that had historically been very polluted. There'd been a lot of industrial uses along Port River and we've been tracking the recovery of that area of seagrass because the water quality had been improving. And then you get a 2-day heat wave come in and it basically killed off all of this seagrass that had been recovering over the previous decade. And yeah, it's really sad. We're doing some work to try and restore that area now, but...

31:14 Tiahni: As you might imagine, it's a little bit more complex than planting a forest.

31:18 Alice: So this is in an intertidal area. So it's seagrass that gets exposed at low tide and it's really muddy. And what we do there is we've got these structures that are made of potato starch and they biodegrade after a certain amount of time. And you bury them and they sort of provide some stability and they stop the sediment from washing away. And then we transplant from a donor meadow. And we just take a core with, with seagrass in it and we move it and we put it into these structures and then it starts to grow outwards from that like 10 cm sort of diameter core that we've transplanted from one place to the other.

31:56 Tiahni: While this one project might seem somewhat small in relation to the scale of the problem, I think it tells a beautiful story of possibility and hope. It's also a growing space and there are a lot of brains working to improve our coastal ecosystems around the world.

32:11 Alice: We should be looking to like the proportion of things that we can still change rather than focusing on all of the things that we've lost or we are going to lose. So one of the things that I try and do is try to think about the actions that we can still take, so targeting our actions towards things that will make a difference.

32:46 Tiahni: It's about time to close the loop. You know what else suffers when seagrass meadows suffer? Turtles. This is Mel, our marine biologist friend again.

32:56 Mel: So two years ago we had the 2022 floods. That would have killed a lot of the seagrass. If you've got a wet year, it kills all the seagrass. Two years later, like 18 months later, the population of nesting turtles won't be fat enough or basically have enough energy reserves to create enough eggs to nest.

33:15 Tiahni: Funny how everything's connected, isn't it? This was our last day in Queensland. Mel, Lisa and I were walking up the beach talking about seagrass floods and turtles, and we got to the next nest. 

33:31 Mel: is this a Green Turtle nest or Logger? 

Lisa: Loggerhead turtle nest? Yeah.

Mel: I'm going to dig it up and see what the hatchling success rate was for this particular nest. There's a lot of goanna activity around the nest, but it doesn't look like any active predation happened overnight, so that's good news.

33:48 Lisa: Baby live!

33:51 Tiahni: A beautiful little hatchling Loggerhead had been left behind overnight. Thankfully, we were there to help it on its journey.

Ohh that's lovely, I'm glad. Hello waru.

34:03 Mel: So you can see these little eyes blinking as well. You know they have to move all that sand by themselves. The rest of the clutch already left and is out swimming there, but he was left behind. So he has had to do all the digging by himself. We're going to give him a little helping hand and pull him out so he doesn't have to do any more digging and could save some of that energy for his big swim out to the... It's just trailing current.

34:16 Tiahni: He's had, say 48 hours or more. Has he had time to come out naturally?

34:32 Mel: And also because he's in that top surface part of the chamber, we've got a heat wave coming today. It's pretty unlikely he would have survived the heat wave, especially if it's getting really, really hot.

34:45 Tiahni: This was not how I expected to finish my turtle journey, but boy am I grateful. This little turtle was no bigger than a credit card. His little flippers are designed for the open ocean, but they make this hatchling look so cute and so vulnerable. Mel and Lisa find a suitable spot for release.

35:05 Mel: So this is good because we haven't got any like big divots and things. It's nice, flat sand. It's going to have a really easy ride into the ocean. You can start to taste the salty air.

35:18 Tiahni: I bent down and we rested him against the sand. We stood back and watched him as he made his way down to the shoreline. 

Mel: One tiny hatchling against the ocean.

35:34 Tiahni: Over millions of years, marine species like Loggerhead Turtles have adapted to manage the gruelling demands of the ocean and all that feed on it. Now I stand before it, humbled by it, drawn to it in awe and afraid for waru all at the same time. And watching this little turtle, this little symbol of hope, perseverance, and grit meeting the cold force of the waves with nothing less than bravery and acquiescence. OK, I might be projecting a little here, but it's an emotional scene to behold.

Bye Waru. I'm so happy. I could cry. Ohh tiny turtle. Big ocean. A race against the odds. Everyone loves an underdog. There are a lot of times when, in the conservation space and doing this sort of work that can be, I guess hard hits and disappointing. And it's really nice seeing a little surviving turtle go out into the water. Yeah. Fills me with lots of hope.

The oceans inhabitants, from microscopic phytoplankton to ginormous humpback whales, have no choice but to take all that's thrown at them. Humans have really piled on challenge after challenge for these species over the past couple 100 years, and climate change might be the toughest of them all. But after hearing the stories of beautiful, authentic oceanic caregivers like Dez, Tabby, Mel, Lisa, Tom, Vanessa and Alice, and after closing out this chapter of my life by seeing this little turtle meet the ocean, I can't help but feel optimistic. There are a lot of good people out there doing everything they can. And like my dear totemic waru, they might just make it out beyond the shore.

37:38 Mel: Almost. Almost. Here he goes, he's so close! There you go. Bye bye! Good luck! He did it.

38:20 Tiahni: We'd like to acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land, sea and skies. We've recorded this podcast on, as well as the lands you're listening in from. We pay our respects to elders, past, present and emerging, and acknowledge the deep and ongoing relationship our First Nations communities have with the ocean, land, freshwater, and all living beings. Big thanks to our guests for this episode. Desmond Williams, Tabby Cowan, Melissa Staines, Lisa del Riccio, Tom Vigilante, Vanessa Pirrota and Alice Jones. This episode was produced by Jill Rischbieth, Will Sacre and myself Tiahni Adamson. Mixed by Mike Williams and original score by Mike Williams and Timothy McCaskey. Our theme music was generously contributed by the Orbweavers. Big shout out to Pod Booth in Adelaide and Rory Noak for his guidance and expertise. You can find out about more of the work of Bush Heritage at Reedy Creek, Wunambal Gaambera Country and beyond in the show notes. We hope you loved this episode. Please subscribe. Share it around with your mates and family and leave us a review. It really helps.

If you enjoyed this season of Big Sky Country, look up Bush Heritage Australia on Instagram and join in on the conversation. Keep an ear out for similar projects like these and future seasons to come. Thank you so much for listening. I'm your host, Tiahni Adamson. See you next time.