I took a look at how our relocated nests are doing vs insitu nests in terms of emergence success. Emergence success (ES) measures how many hatchlings make it out of the nest from the egg clutch the mother laid down.
Historically relocated nests have done slightly better than insitu nests in terms of hatching and emergence success. This is important and indicates we are doing our job as volunteers well and following established procedures.
As of today, there are 48 nests that have been inventoried out of 127 total nests laid. 27 of those 48 are relocated nests (56%). So far, the overall ES is 74.8%. The insitu nests only were 75.9%. Unfortunately the relocated nests sit at an ES of 74.5%. To try and understand why the relocated ES was lower than that for insitu nests, I dug into the data more.
It turns out there was a relocated nest that had 0% ES - the only nest of the 48 at zero. This was nest #22 where the mother dug and left 2 empty egg chambers and then on the way back to the ocean laid 22 eggs at the water line. The eggs were relocated but there was no emergence from any eggs once inventoried. If we take this one nest out of the mix, then the relocated nest ES moves up to 77.2%. This one nest has quite an impact.
Let’s see where we stand at season end.
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