Scientists

My love of the ocean started in childhood. We would go to Portarlington on the Bellarine Peninsula in Victoria every summer for a month in January. Trips to the beach involved me going straight into the water as soon as we arrived and I would not leave the water until the car was packed and the whole family was ready to leave. My first love of marine animals was dolphins, dugongs and whales but I have now embraced sea turtles and I have come to appreciate all marine life from small copepods to great white sharks and everything in-between. I am fascinated by how far turtles travel and how their time in the ocean between their birth on a beach to coming back to the same beach to breed is relatively unknown (they don’t call it the ‘lost years’ for nothing). I am hoping through the REDMAP project to learn about some unexpected aspects to sea turtle distribution. I love the surprise that wildlife research provides.