Day 26 in Santa Cruz!!

Hey Everyone!

Today was an amazing day well spent at Tortuga Bay! Everyone got to spend the day relaxing, tanning, swimming, and kayaking. We also got to see a lot of our favorite animals from the island at the beach. We saw marine iguanas, black tip reef sharks, white tip reef sharks, sea turtles, and even some stingrays. My personal favorite sighting of the day was seeing the sea turtles super up close while we were kayaking. The sea turtles are so much bigger than I would’ve originally guessed. We also learned a little bit about sea turtles such as how a sea turtles shell can sometimes be used to determine the species of sea turtle and can even go as far to be able to identify a specific sea turtle. We also found out that the sand temperatures that sea turtle eggs are layer in determines the sex of the sea turtle! After our day at the beach we headed over to Bahia Mar and had a phenomenal dinner and then of course ended the night with gelato. Overall it was a nice reward for all of us being we recently finished our data collection and wanted to kick our feet back and relax!

-Ava Stagner