Pacuare Reserve has been working for the last 25 years in protecting the Leatherback sea turtle and collecting data about nesting trends, population status and nests survival. The leatherback turtle rookery of Caribbean Central America (with Pacuare being an important nesting beach), represents one of the four largest remaining rookeries worldwide, together with French Guiana/Suriname, Gabon and Trinidad (Troëng et al., 2004).
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The 3.72 miles (6 km) of the beach are walked every night during the nesting and hatching season (from the end of February to September) for the research assistants, volunteers and group of students that visit the Reserve. Every night, three different shifts cover the beach from 8 pm to 4 am, to minimize the lost of sea turtles and there's a morning count to check for new activities or hatchings emerging. There are two stations, at each end of the beach, and there are one group coming from each station every night.
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The research assistants have a training period at the beginning of the season with theoretical and practical sessions to ensure the standardization of the data collection. There are some sessions during the season to check the compliance of the protocols and to correct differences between the two stations. The guards are in charge of the beach protection by keeping the two ends of the beach and avoiding people not related to the project to access the beach.
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The research method include:
-tagging the turtles with external metallic tags and internal PIT tags (passive integrated transponders)
-collecting biometric data, length and width of the shell
-checking for damages or injuries
-egg counting and decision about the destination of the nest, either "In Situ" (the original place where the turtle laid) or "relocated" (moved to a different, safer location of the beach)
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The last years we have been working with a hatchery (safe enclosure to relocate the nests), otherwise we relocate the nests on the safest places of the beach according to the season and the conditions.
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During the hatching season we also collect data on hatching success and hatching survival by excavating the nests two days after they hatch. We also make sure that the sea turtle hatchlings make their way to the sea by scaring possible predators.
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Several researchers have used the Reserve as base for their investigations. That's the case of Marga López Rivas who developed her phD research for three years, publishing papers on the effect of artificial lights on the hatchling's ability to find their way to the sea; the effects of the dunes caused by beach erosion on the leatherbacks nesting behavior or the nesting ecology and population trends of the sea turtle population at Pacuare.
The Reserve has also participated in the publication of some other papers in collaboration with other institutions or researchers. In 2016, Sean Williamson from Monash University in Australia and under Richard's Reina supervision studied the effect of oxygen on Leatherback sea turtle eggs as part of his phD.
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