Calabasas grad tracks wild turtles

Stephanie Goodman's "what I did over summer vacation" story reads differently than most.

The 2001 Calabasas High School graduate took the trip of a lifetime and traveled to the island of Trinidad in the Caribbean Sea where she helped tag wild sea turtles.

Goodman, who is now a high school special education teacher in Watts, joined a research team on a 13-day trip to Matura Beach where she assisted in the tagging of the endangered Leatherback Sea Turtle.

She was sponsored on her trip by the Helen and Peter Bing foundation.

From June to July, Goodman and six other volunteers from the United States and England became part of a research team from the Earthwatch Institute. The team was lead by Dennis Sammy, the founder of Nature Seekers, a local turtle conservation group.

The volunteers assisted the locals in patrolling the beach and looking for both mother and baby Leatherbacks. They also helped to place silver tags on the rear flippers of the turtles and to place microchips in the shoulders of the animals that had not previosuly been tagged.

GOTCHA!-Calabasas High School graduate Stephanie Goodman spent the summer as part of an Earthwatch research team, tagging wild sea turtles in Trinidad. Above, a baby turtle prepares to embark on its life journey in the sea. "The Nature Seekers have incredible passion for their work with the Leatherback Sea Turtle, and that drive rubbed off a bit each day onto us as volunteers," Goodman said.

When the volunteers met turtles that had previously been tagged, they recorded the numbers of the tags and scanned the turtle with a device that read information off the embedded microchip. The information was later entered into the Caribbean Turtle database to keep track of population, nesting patterns and migration patterns.

"The tagging of the turtles was incredible because you felt as if you were sitting with a dinosaur," Goodman said. "We were able to get up close and personal with the turtles, tag them, and have an extremely hands-on experience."

Goodman said she's looking forward to bringing her newly learned information back to the classroom in the fall. She hopes to educate her students on the reasons why certain species became endangered in the first place.

She also hopes to start an environmental club on campus with another teacher who had been on a similar Earthwatch trip.

Goodman graduated from the University of Washington-Seattle in 2005.

Earthwatch is a world leader in the field of experimental education providing opportunities in the field and online for volunteers to broader their understanding of sustainability and support conservation research.

For more information, visit www.earthwatch.org.