Tours at DEKAMER

It’s been amazing to get to spend time with and learn about loggerhead sea turtles. I know we’re living in a center that specializes in caring for these sea turtles and educating people about them, but I never imagined the range of activities we would get to participate in.

We give tours of our eight healthier loggerheads at the center two out of every three days. We mostly give tours to people from the UK, with the rare American visiting once or twice a week. The center also gets a lot of visitors from Germany, the Netherlands, and Turkey, but other volunteers give tours to these visitors because of the language barriers.

It’s really interesting to hear what questions people ask about the turtles. The kids often come in asking to see the “baby turtle,” wanting to know which ones are girls, or letting us know that they have a toy turtle named Mr. Swimmykins and he is exactly like the turtles we have here. I love having kids on the tours because, while it’s hard to forget how cool these turtles are, the kids always help to get me even more excited about the turtles.

While people have a wide range of reactions to the turtles, they are pretty consistently shocked to see how big they are. Our biggest turtle is Dogan, weighing in at 52 kilos. Everyone also tends to get excited when the turtles come up to breathe, making it seem like they’re saying hello.

Some people are happy just to hear what we have to say about the turtles, but others ask really in depth questions, such as “what is a loggerhead’s resting heart rate?” or “what is the maximum speed a loggerhead can swim?” These questions always catch me off-guard (they’re definitely beyond the scope of questions I would come up with on a family vacation here), but they’re also helpful in getting us to learn more about the turtles themselves. Because, somehow, these questions tend to get asked multiple times over the course of the week, so we look up the answers and are able to turn around and actually give answers to them the next time they are asked.

I expected to learn about the turtles mostly through our patrols and our time talking to the more permanent staff at the center or the PhD students who come to stay and work with us sporadically. But it’s cool that these tours have motivated us to learn facts about the turtles that we might not have encountered otherwise.

The main DEKAMER area where we keep our healing loggerhead turtles and give tours.