Methods

3 captured turtles
Scientific crew aboard the RV Georgia Bulldog posing with a rare triple catch of juvenile Kemp's ridley sea turtles.

The basic premise of this program is to capture sea turtles by trawling, to collect biological samples and record measure-ments and observations for the sea turtles captured, and to characterize the associated fish and invertebrate bycatch species also collected by trawling. The following Methods pages provide a synopsis of how each of these three inter-related data collection efforts is conducted.