Flash back

 While the new innovative tags developed by Ifremer and CNRS-LIRMM as part of the IOT project were deployed on ten juvenile turtles in Mayotte in July and August 2021, you should know that the very first attempt to tag a marine turtle with a tag was made in Mayotte in September 1997.

This first deployment in Mayotte and second in the western Indian Ocean (a similar experiment had been conducted in South Africa) was carried out on a female green turtle (Chelonia mydas) that had come to lay eggs on the beach of Saziley (south-east of Mayotte).

Named Ilana, this turtle allowed scientists to follow the movements of a sea turtle for 33 days for the very first time.

 

 This mission, financed by the Water and Forestry Service of the Direction of Agriculture and Forestry (DAF) of Mayotte, called on the skills of Ifremer and the expertise of Mr Jacques FRETEY, then in charge of the marine turtle issue at WWF France, to carry out the first satellite monitoring of the movement of a nesting green turtle with an ARGOS tag. The model of the tag chosen at the time was the "ST-10 tag proposed by Telonics, the world leader in the design of ARGOS devices applied to animal tracking". The dimensions of the tag were 13 x 4 x 2 cm and it weighed approximately 300g.