Calling all turtle lovers! Join us, Saturday, April 6th from 10am – 4pm at the St. Pete Pier in front of the Tampa Bay Watch Discovery Center.
The Indi-ED student-led Totally Tubular Turtle Team and three schools from the Cayman Islands are all working together to power the 2024 Turtle Festival! Expect crafts, educational activity booklets, a picture booth, giveaways, and lots of fun!
As nesting season begins in our area, the festival will provide a fun hands-on way to teach our community more about sea turtles and the habitat that supports them.
Our passion project to save marine life started in 2019 when we applied and were awarded a Jane Goodall mini-grant which motivated a group of students at Indi-ED to create an educational activity booklet all about our Florida coastlines and how you can learn more about and take steps to help support our local habitats and marine life.
We’re not the only people that care about this underwater community. At our school’s Community Connections event (where kids get input on their inquiry projects from professionals in our community), we collaborated with NOAA, Sea Turtle Trackers and Tampa Bay Watch to help us get additional information about how these organizations are helping to save sea turtles. We also brainstormed ideas on how we can turn our dream of hosting a Turtle Festival into a reality. As a result, they all agreed to join us at the festival.
A few of the things they are bringing are a real turtle carapace (turtle shell), a turtle excluder device, and TED for short – an attachment to trawl nets that are designed to collect shrimp.
Trawl nets, unfortunately they also catch sea turtles. So that is where TED comes into play. TED is made up of metal bars that prevent sea turtles from getting trapped by pushing them out a flap in the top that the shrimp can’t get through, but the turtles can, so fishermen get their shrimp while turtles are no longer harmed. At the turtle festival we will have a large version of the TED there, so that kids can crawl through and have a first hand experience of an innovation that is helping save the sea turtles.
So come join us at the first Turtle Festival at the St. Petersburg Pier, Saturday, April 6th so that you can learn more about the hundreds of sea turtles that will nest on our beaches over the next several months. You can take home a bookmark with a list of ways you can help save the sea turtles so that you can share what you learned with your friends as you wear your badge of honor, an adorable, “I saved a life!” sea turtle pin.
We can’t wait to see you there!
-The Totally Tubular Turtle Team 🐢