Mini-Me 2
airG is one of the lead conservation partners of the Sea Turtle Tracker KY project. They are supporting three satellite transmitters to help researchers follow sea turtles as they move through Cayman waters and across the wider Caribbean.
Each turtle will reveal something different about how sea turtles use important breeding, feeding and resting areas throughout their lives.
Learn more about MiniMe and other applications developed by airG by clicking on the airG logo.
Aristurtle
Sponsored by Appleby, Aristurtle will help answer fundamental questions about the movements and ecology of male green turtles during and after the breeding season. Once breeding has finished, male turtles leave Cayman waters and begin their migration to feeding grounds somewhere else in the Caribbean. Where they travel, how far they migrate, which habitats they rely upon and whether they return to the same areas annually, are questions that have remained largely unanswered.
By following Turtle Name’s journey, researchers hope to identify critical feeding habitats, understand how turtle populations are connected across the region and generate valuable information that will help guide future conservation efforts both in the Cayman Islands and internationally.
Star Boy
Sponsored by Cayman National, Star boy represents an exciting opportunity to study one of the least understood groups of sea turtles in the Caribbean. Unlike females, adult male green turtles never come ashore, making them exceptionally difficult to study. Instead, they must be located at sea and carefully captured by a team of experienced researchers using coordinated free-diving techniques, with several divers working together to safely bring the turtle alongside the boat before applying a satellite transmitter.
Successfully capturing and tagging a breeding male is therefore a significant achievement in itself. Every individual tracked helps build a clearer picture of this little-understood part of the population and provides researchers with valuable information that simply cannot be collected using traditional nesting beach studies.