pelf-ism is contagious

I had a very amazing adventure yesterday, at the “mighty” Tennessee River. I mentioned yesterday that we were going to set up some basking traps, and soon after running some errands, Dr. Wilson and his graduate student, Robert, started preparing for the trip — they loaded the 27-foot boat onto the trailer, and then hooked the trailer onto the truck, and I helped load some of the 15 basking traps onto the boat.

A basking trap is basically a rectangular enclosure attached with 2 covers made from aluminum that serve as the “ladder” on which the turtles will climb if they wanted to bask. Once the turtle arrives at the top of its climb, the aluminum cover will tilt and the turtle will fall into the rectangular enclosure (see images above and below).

We spent 3 hours deploying the basking traps in the river, and my, I was amazed at the sheer size of the river! The Tennessee River is so many times wider and longer than the Setiu River that I am now quite familiar with. In fact, the Tennessee River is so huge that I thought we were in the Gulf of Mexico already! It was very windy, and very cold, and the water was very choppy. It felt like the last time I was in the sea in a small boat, deploying fish traps to trap fish larvae!

Dr. Wilson said that we will be deploying some baited traps on Monday, and that we will be checking out the traps in the coming days and week, and it would be interesting to see the species and number of turtles that are trapped in the basking traps, baited or not.

But before that, we’re going to a “spring party” at a UTC Professor’s house tomorrow night, and I have no idea what to wear. I mean, casual or formal? Traditional? Simple?

ARGH!!

A couple of days ago, we looked at some amazing posters drawn by the participants of the turtle camps. Today, we’re going to look at some of the samples of turtle-related “artwork” that they made with plasticine

This has got two turtles, and both turtles have eyes like Ultraman, said my sister. It has got a polka-dot fish and two nudibranchs as well! It has also got a starfish, and a ray.

Seriously, I am not too sure if I’ve got that level of creativity in me!

The turtles made by this particular group looked nicer, more refined, and more REAL, right? You know why? Because the turtles weren’t made by the students! In fact, J made them for his group, and expectedly, students from other groups started pestering their facilitators to help them make turtles that looked nicer than those produced by J’s group.

Some students in my group even insisted that facilitators shouldn’t help their group because they thought it wasn’t fair. Actually, everybody just wanted to win so badly.

And whoever told the students that seahorses hold on to sea grasses THAT way?! Brilliant, aren’t they?

The naughty students in this particular group decided to make a man eating turtle eggs, so I told them this group wouldn’t win the plasticine competition. You should have just seen their faces! They all looked like they wanted to kill the person who contributed the idea!

One of the fun-nest things about conducting turtle camps is that you will never know what to expect from the students.

I was quite surprised to learn, in one of the earlier camps, that there are Year 5 and 6 students who actually can’t read or write. Nevermind the fact that only a handful of them could read the two simple English poems during the camp, some students don’t even remember their father’s name! Some students couldn’t spell their names correctly, and I have a feeling some others don’t even know why we were there, in their school, in the first place!

But despite all those “surprising findings”, there were also a handful of students who were clearly above the others. Like those students who produced the following posters:

The poster above shows a little boy holding a hatchling on his right hand, and cuddling a juvenile turtle with his left hand. The wordings actually read “I Penyu & Tuntung”, which I thought was very creative. The drawing is very sharp, and the colours very attractive. Can you see the turtle hatchling emerging from the egg??

The second poster, I believe, was drawn very meticulously. The students remembered very clearly that leatherback turtles feed on jellyfish, green turtles on sea grasses and hawksbill turtles on sponges. Seriously, these are only 11 and 12 year old students!

The third poster shows the threats that our turtles are facing — a turtle is trapped in a fisherman’s net, a turtle is consuming a plastic bag, which it mistakes as a jellyfish, and there are rubbish on the sea floor.

Next up, I’ve got pictures of beautiful sea creatures that the students made from plasticine!