Thank you, thank you. And thank you very much to C. It's really comprehensive and just incredibly enjoyable, talk about plastics and the, the problems that we're currently facing, and a really good setup to talk about, working with animals that actually have firsthand, problems with, with the plastic pollution.

So, a little bit about myself. I did a biology degree up in Oxford, and was really interested in working in conservation. especially wild animals, and therefore wanted to do a veterinary degree so I could work like hands on with, animals.

And this obviously probably is the best job I could have ever envisaged, which is to work, with sea turtles. And my first job happened to be in the Maldives. So, with no further ado, I'll talk you through the incredible work of the Olive Riley project.

So this is a UK where charity. It was set up in 2014 by a marine biologist that was working in the Maldives, Martin Stelfox, and he noticed just the sheer number of sea turtles that were being found entangled in ghost nets, in the Maldives. So he wanted to basically set a charity up that would actually create awareness of the problem of ghost nets, which I'll be talking about in more details shortly, to actually educate, .

And to create awareness of this, this, this global problem and hopefully minimise problem, especially within the country, within the Maldives and greater further afield in the Indian Ocean. And finally, his dream was to provide a marine turtle rescue centre where sea turtles could actually be treated in in the country in the Maldives that they were being found. So just to quickly give you a heads up that the Olive Ridley project.

It's actually named after a species of sea turtle, one of 7, which is named the Olive Ridley. Sadly, no one knows where the ridley came from, and the olive is a bit of a mis mis misname because, actually, it's not really green or black. It's sort of an off greyish colour.

So it's the olive Ridley turtle that the charity is named after. And it's named after this turtle because it's the most likely turtle to be found entangled in fishing nets. So I'll briefly talk to you about the Maldives itself, it's an incredible country found in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

It actually, has a length sort of 800 kilometres, which is sort of the same length as Portugal, to be a reference. But actually the land mass of the islands is less than 300 square kilometres, which actually is smaller than the Isle of Wight in terms of area. So it's predominantly coral reefs and beautiful turquoise seas, but it's very little land.

The land, the islands are made up, in 26 atolls, and there are over 1100 islands. Only 185 of these are actually inhabited by. Maldivian local people, but there are over now 120 resorts, and the resorts are, hotels that actually are in one island, just they make up the entire island itself.

So it's quite a unique country of local inhabitants, but also, what the Maldives is mostly known for, which I think we can say is the rich and famous celebrities, but also it's a very popular destination for honeymooners. And it's mostly known for these beautiful, villas that are often, Actually not, real. They're, they're, they're manmade.

They are built on, sort of, built on sandbanks that are created especially for the resorts. So it's sort of quite an artificial, and yet surrounded by a very beautiful natural environment. But what I think is really important and what the Maldives should be known for is the fact that they're they're a country where predominantly and fishing is sort of their main main source of income other than, the hotels.

But they Actually use this whole in line fishing method, which does not use fishing nets. So, despite the the the reason that the charity being set up in the country, because of the fishing nets and the turtles that are found in the surrounding waters, the country themselves do not use fishing nets. They actually predominantly and only use, the pole and line source of fishing, and it is the most sustainable way of fishing, and they're not actually contributing to the problems of the turtles and the nets that are found there.

So that's a really important message that I'd like to like to give. So I'll briefly talk to you about the overall threat to sea turtles. Sadly, the biggest threat to turtles, is us, which is not surprising given that that's sort of sadly what's happening to all the animals, many in the world.

But for sea turtles themselves, they've got, many issues that we, our man created. So unfortunately, they are often kept as pets, when they are hatchlings, they are exceptionally cute and very small. And people often think that they, they would make a really good pet.

But sad. They go from being a few centimetres to metres, and, the largest leatherback has been almost 900 kilogrammes. So they're not the most ideal, of creatures to be kept as pets.

They are marine reptiles, which means that they obviously have to come up to the surface to breathe, and they do warm themselves up in the sun by sunbathing too on the surface. And sadly, in the Maldives, well, well, the boats are the most common form of transport, and they can often be hit, when they're breathing and, and floating. And also, as I mentioned earlier, these resorts that are numbering, I think at the end of the year, over 150 will actually be in the country.

They, they actually are based on an entire island, which means that there's often these water villas being built and, beach villas being also created that, have a knock-on effect on the habitat. That the turtles were due to use for the females laying their nests, for example, and even the coral reefs themselves are damaged sometimes when the, the villas are being built along the coral reef. Plastic rubbish, obviously it's the point of this talk, shall go into a little bit more details.

And most importantly, I think we can talk about is the fishing gear, the ro nets, and then finally, sadly, even in the Maldives and many most every country in the world, it is illegal to eat fishing, turtles and their eggs, but sadly, it's still a process that is ongoing in many countries, but also in the Maldives. So for me personally, this is a really big issue cos I absolutely love being in the sea, it's one of the reasons why I wanted to work with marine life and, and I, I'm a keen scuba diver, I free dive a paddle board, which I'll talk to you briefly at the end, and for me this is actually. Something that happened on a regular basis that I'd be swimming around the island and I would often mistake a plastic bag for a jellyfish, from a distance.

And I've got pretty good eyesight, so if I was making this mistake, then you can quite easily understand how sea turtles are doing the same. And this is actually the stomach contents of just one sea turtle. I have to point out because many children when I do this presentation to school children will tell me and ask me whether they ate that ruler, but actually that's just there to give you an idea of sort of size and of the plastic.

So this one sad turtle had actually eaten all of this plastic and it was found in its stomach after a postmortem. So, they often get very confused with different exciting coloured plastics, and they will, they will eat anything that they can find. So this is a really big issue to the ingestion.

It's not just entanglement. And on the right there, that was the first sea turtle all over Italy that I found, entangled in a net. The top of that net on the right, was actually around its neck, and the rest, that entire length, over 2030 centimetres worth of ghost net, it had actually, consumed in a bid to try and escape the ghost net.

So I actually had to pull that out of its mouth. So, ingestion is a, is a really big problem for sea turtles too. .

But the really big problem in the Maldives is the ghost nets, and they are, it's just a kind of posh term to refer to any discarded, abandoned or lost fishing nets, that often then become entangled together and they form these large conglomerates of, of fishing nets in the sea. They are silent killers and they are non-selective as to what they entangle. Sadly, apex predators like sharks are often entangled, large, valuable fish species like tuna, and obviously sea turtles are, often found entangled within these nets.

And they also, damage the reef itself because obviously the coral requires sunlight and they can actually become quite entangled onto the coral and the spread of the sea and do a lot of damage, to the other wildlife too. Having mentioned that resorts obviously do sometimes have a negative impact on natural habitat of those sea turtles and wildlife in the Maldives, they can actually be very useful for providing the infrastructure to actually remove these nets, because some of these nets are sort of tonnes and tonnes in weight, and this is a prime example of just right lying, right place where this net happened to be, floating near an island that was being built. So they are absolutely massive, unfortunately.

So, like I said, they're not really selective as to what they catch, and in the Maldives, primarily Olive Ridley sea turtles are the, the biggest, impacts on these ghost nets. And here you can also see two reef sharks. So this is generally how we find them.

And they get reported to us by marine biologists, by guests, by dive teams, and an olive Ridley here you can see is caught just by its back flipper. We find them entangled in front flippers, their neck, and their tails, and their entire shell themselves can be entangled within the net. So the UN has estimated that over 640,000 tonnes of these ghost nets are lost every year.

And being a vet, I like to think of everything in terms of size of animals. So that's actually the equivalent of 160,000 African elephants in weight of ghost nets that are lost to the ocean every year. So it's actually, it's a huge, huge problem.

And very sadly, I often would find turtles in this state where the net was much larger than the animal itself. And sorry, a heads up now that quite a few of these photos are very horrible to see, and it just shows you the extent of damage that these nets can be doing to these turtles. So, sadly if it's not just bone that's left, you can actually find a state of horrific injury to turtles where their flippers are almost nothing but bones and flesh.

And even more sadly, I think you could argue that we often would find nets with just bones that were left, this is the humerus of a. Of a sea turtle, and you can actually see on the photo on the right just how deeply cut that that bone is, and we'd often find turtles with lacking flippers entirely due to due to the severity of the entanglement. So a little bit more positive note, pretty picture.

This is the island that I called home for almost a year, when I went out there in 2016, . The island itself was only 800 metres by 200 metres, so I could walk around this island in about half an hour, paddle boarded it in about 45 minutes. And I actually turned up in November to quite a worrying, state of affairs where the tanks weren't quite ready yet, and I had to set up a veterinary clinic with apparently $500.

In the bank. So it was a bit of a daunting process, but within a few months and a few months even to get a veterinary licence in the country and a controlled drugs licence, we now have what is an incredible centre that is there today. So we have these incredible 7 tanks, that we use to rehabilitate the turtles after surgery, after they've been found entangled, and some smaller tanks for the smaller turtles and also after surgery for recovery.

And it gives you an idea of sort of how big these tanks are. The largest tank is 7 metres long, and they are all 2 metres deep, which is really important for the sea turtles to actually rehabilitate, to learn how to dive after they've been found floating in these nets. So most of my time wasn't as glamorous as being a sea turtle vet in the Maldives that's actually spent, cleaning a lot of tanks and being watched by guests when doing so.

But the, the clinic itself is now fully operational, it's up and running. This is the vet that's currently out there, also named Claire, we're performing surgery together when I, went out and visited her last year, and we actually have a portable ultrasound machine and thanks to Peter Catterwell from Tipping Norton, Hospital, we've now actually got, an X-ray machine, in the clinic itself. So the turtles themselves, how do we get them to my little island?

Well, obviously the easiest way, most portable way is, by speedboat. This is actually the team at Coco Resort, Coco Diaolu, my island home, the, there's the boats, . Staff actually dropped off some school children that visited the centre and on the way back come across this net and you can just about make out this all over Riley there entangled in it.

So this is the easiest and most practical way to get turtles to us. But one of the most exciting things we did was, within a few months of setting up. The rescue centre, we partnered with the seaplane company Transportivan Airways, and they agreed to ship to fly our turtles from anywhere in the Maldives.

If we could get them to a resort that had a plane jetty, then we could get the turtles on board for free. So they actually have flying turtles in the Maldives that come to our rescue centre. So, if turtles actually fortunate enough to land on the island where the rescue centre is, like this turtle here, Chanel, are named after Coco, the island, we can obviously get to work, and untangling them immediately and assessing their injuries.

The majority of turtles would come to the island with very deep wounds to lacerations to their flippers, and you can actually see the extent of the depth of these wounds because they're on the right there you can see the bone. So it was sometimes quite difficult necessarily to save them, especially if the humus had been completely fractured, all the wounds were just so deep that they'd severed, obviously muscle, and nerves, and this particular turtle we were quite worried about because both rippers, both left and right, were. Badly damaged.

This is an example where we took it to the local hospital before we had our X-ray machine. So that's 45 minutes by speed boat to a human hospital to beg them to use their X-ray machine. And as you can see from this picture, just how much damage is done to, to both those flippers.

But Claire and I were there together, tackled a flipper each, and I'm happy to say that this very fortunate turtle, Chanel, got the use of both flippers, and, only a few months later she was actually able to be released. You can see her flapping away there. She was quite keen to get back in the sea.

Bit of a drop, and you can see just how well. And quickly She decided to get back into the deep blue, so as you can imagine, that's the most . Enjoyable part of the, of the job out there.

But sadly, that's not always the case. This, obviously is another example of a juvenile, Olive Ridley that had such a severe injury that obviously the only thing that could be done for this slipper was to be amputated, sadly. And so after performing surgery, not long after, she was back in the tank, learning.

And getting used to swimming with a missing flipper. And they do surprisingly well, . Without, without one flipper, they we learn how to balance themselves and how to swim, how to dive, and, we actually know that they can be released really, well with, with the flip of a missing because we, they are seen on nesting beaches with just 33 flippers.

So we do know that they can, live and sustain sustain the normal, normal lives in the wild. I just wanted to show you this video here. I'll say another example of a successful release, despite the constriction of the net, you can see on that front right flipper.

But what's really important about this video is just to show you the difference between an adult male, and an adult female. So in this video you can see the length of that tail. I might just show it one more time.

So if you can see a tail, at the back end of a sea turtle past its shell, then it's a male. It's huge, in male sea turtles. So if you can't, they're either a juvenile, they haven't reached such maturity, or it's a female.

So that's just talking about sort of individual cases that we've had at the rescue centre. I really wanted to let you guys know that as of April this year, it's very exciting that we, the resort have allowed me to sort of start these vet exchanges. So we're always really excited to share this experience with, with other vets and.

Nurses to, and we have agreed with the resort that vets can stay for a two week period of time on the island, for free, so food and board covered, so just flights, and the idea is to sort of share your knowledge as as veterinarians and practise, . And hopefully bring us some, some nice, kit if you can. But it's a really great way of actually being able to work with wildlife, and obviously, it does help to have some downtime in the Maldives if you can, if you can do it.

So anytime between April and October, we're, we're welcoming vets to come and join, our team and actually spend some time with some sea turtles. So please be aware of that and get hold of me, on, directly on the website, and I'm sure we'll talk about that later. And obviously please follow the work that we're doing, Facebook and Instagram, we're really big on sort of showing our stories and our cases, the work that we're doing.

Out there. For me, the reason, another reason why I actually love the job is the awareness side of it. I love being able to tell children what we're doing in the Maldives.

It is at the moment, still the only veterinary centre in the country. So it's really important to actually just by being there, the presence of treating wild animals is now hopefully starting. This year we'll be opening, a fully veterinary clinic for the cats that they have in the country.

And, but it was a very weird situation where you're starting to open the only veterinary clinic, but again, the children, are really interested by what we're doing with working with the turtles and also as, as a veterinarian. So we do also do expeditions. A big part of the project is just to map, turtles in the country, so we have a population study, with photo IDs, and we're getting like the children, local children on different islands involved with actually being part of that process.

And more sort of globally, global Ghostnet, initiatives, it's the Global Ghost Ski initiative is something that I'm also part of and the charity is part of. So we really are sort of focusing on why the nets are being lost, and how to sort of prevent them from being lost in the future. And I think it's a really important job for me as a vet to actually represent sort of, working with the animals that obviously are entangled in nets and are ingesting plastics.

For me it's really opened my eyes as to what is being done, on the international scale and how to be part of that. I think it's a really important message. And, as Car mentioned, paddle boarding is something that we're both very keen on, and then next month we're actually gonna be embarking on a 100 kilometre paddle board.

Expedition with two lovely Maldivian ladies that you can see behind me there, and we're going to be going around Bar Atoll, which is where the rescue centre is based in the Maldives, and we're gonna just be talking and highlighting the wonderful work that's already being done in the country by local NGOs, by islands, by local businesses and resorts as to how they're combating single-use plastics, how they're implementing new ways of, reusing plastics, and water. Use as well, because obviously at the moment, mostly water and country comes in bottled form, so they're trying to make, filtered water available to all local islands. So, I just want to say thank you very much for listening, and just to show you that it's not just sea turtles in the Maldives that sadly are entangled.

This is a beautiful humpback whale, that was found last year by the Maldives whale shark project. And as you can see, it's got a single, space net, monofilament line attached to it. And they had a really good go at actually trying to, to remove that net too, so, .

Just, yeah, thank you very much for listening. Yeah. That's super, that's really good, thank you so much for that, it's really inspirational what you're doing and so good to have met you on LinkedIn and got you involved in this.

I think it's been really great that the vets know kind of what's going on. We're gonna move very quickly on, because we are very tight on time, as Bruce said.