Vihara Mahadevi

Turtle Track Sri Lanka 2006-07: Green Turtles

A project of Marine Turtle Research Group.

click map for full-size version Up until her last transmission (03.10.06), Devi's locations suggest that she continued to inter-nest at Koggala about 60km to the west of Rekawa. She is the only one of these turtles to inter-nest away from Rekawa, where she last nested on the 02.09.06. We are no longer receiving transmissions from her tag.

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Species: Green Turtle
Life Stage: Adult
Gender: Female
Release Date: 2006-08-03 01:05:00
Release Location: Rekawa
Last Location: 2006-10-03 12:58:12

Background

Vihari Mahadevi (Devi) was the third turtle to be satellite tagged in Sri Lanka. She was tagged after her 5th nest on Rekawa beach during the 2006 season. Her name is that of an early Sri Lanka queen, who, according to legend, stopped a tsunami. She was tagged by officers of the Turtle Conservation Project (TCP) and the Department of Wildlife Conservation (DWC) under supervision of Peter Richardson from the Marine Conservation Society (MCS).

After she was tagged on the 03.08.06, Devi internested off Rekawa beach until she nested again on the 17.08.06. She then travelled to Koggala just over 60km west along the southern coast of Sri Lanka, where she spent her inter-nesting period of about 2 weeks before swimming back to Rekawa to nest there again on the 02.09.06. After her last nest she swam back to Koggala where she stayed for a month before her last transmission on the 03.10.06. Is Koggala Devi's home? If so, this would be quite unusual for adult female green turtles. Like the other turtles in this study, adult female green turtles usually spend most of their time at foraging grounds hundreds of kilometres away from the nesting beach. Devi's tag was supported by The Deep Aquarium in Hull, who ran a turtle naming competition and thereby also gave Devi the name of Conchita.