Up track, no down track

Always a bad sign... unfortunately for this turtle it became the first statistic on the east coast, following the tell-tale drag mark almost a kilometer off the beach, we found the remains of a 80cm female loggerhead. This is the first carapace we have found, compared to last year when we would regularly find three or four left on the beach every morning, turtle-killers are now too scared to do their work on the beaches because there are too many people watching. Another change is that they had made a feeble attempt to erase the turtle's tracks, but it was still immediately obvious what had happened. Usually the flippers are discarded, but in this case they were missing, leading to a suspicion that, unfortunately, she was a turtle that we had previously tagged. Her eggs were laying scattered along her remains, so another generation has also been lost.