Why Jo searches murky waters for creatures weighing up to 180kg

Metres below the surface, Dr Jo Day moves slowly through the murky water, eyes darting through the gloom.

Somewhere nearby, a creature that could weight up to 180kg is lurking. It's Day's job to find it.

"We're working with wild animals," she tells 9honey, "and things don't always go to plan."

READ MORE: Koala expert's plea to everyday Aussies: 'It's terrifying'

Moments later, she spots what she's looking for; a loggerhead turtle measuring almost a metre from tip to tail. This one's much closer to 80kg.

Now the real work begins.

As a Conservation Biologist for Taronga Conservation Society Australia, Day's on a mission to get satellite trackers on the backs of wild turtles to better understand their habitats and, hopefully, protect them.

It's a new approach in Australia's ongoing turtle tracking conservation efforts and Day wasn't sure how well it would work until she was diving off Coffs Harbour this June and spotted that first turtle.

"The visibility was terrible because there had been a huge swell," she reveals, "but our first trip was very successful."

The team managed to tag two loggerhead turtles and one green turtle, swimming each one to the surface for a quick health assessment and to secure the satellite tracker before sending them on their way.

"We learned a lot about how to catch the turtles, because they're very strong animals, and we had to make sure that they don't swim away," Day laughs.

"But the turtles, they were pretty relaxed [...] they didn't struggle and once we put them back into the water, they're happy to just swim away."

Describing it from a lab at Taronga's Institute of Science and Learning, Day makes the whole thing sound simple but there were certainly challenges.

READ MORE: Justine's job is so bizarre you've definitely never heard of it

First they tried bringing the turtles to the surface in a net that turned out to be so heavy they could barely swim with it while it was empty; then Day's flipper got tangled in a dive flag while they were trying to bring the first turtle up, which they had to get loose without losing the turtle.

But Day views the trip as a mammoth win, not just for her and the team, but for turtle conservation in Australia at large.

"In New South Wales, we have more and more marine turtles coming into our waters, and we still don't know much about where and when these marine turtles are coming and what they're doing," she says.

The leatherback, loggerhead and olive ridley turtles that call our waters home are all listed as endangered under the Government's Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, while green, hawksbill and flatback turtles are each listed as vulnerable. 

All are in need of better protection from common threats like marine debris, boat strikes, pollution and entanglement in fishing gear and shark nets, but to protect these beloved marine creatures, scientists like Day first need to understand them.

"They're quite cryptic animals. They spend most of the time underwater," Day explains.

"We need to know where they're foraging, where they're resting, where they're nesting, so that we can protect those environments."

And that takes data.

Scientists at Taronga have been using satellite tracking methods to learn more about turtle movements and habitats for decades, but until recently they'd mostly focused on tracking turtles that were released into the wild from the zoo's wildlife hospitals.

READ MORE: No one knew what Sarah had stashed in her backseat driving through Sydney

Now, the zoo is working with Sydney Institute of Marine Science and NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service to track wild turtle populations and use the resulting data to bolster vital conservation efforts.

That's what Day set out to do last month in Coffs Harbour and Forster, and she's already seeing the results.

"We can monitor the tracking data in real time and seeing that first day of locations was the best," she says, and the data just keeps coming in.

Conservation scientists then pass it on to organisations like New South Wales marine parks, where it's used to inform better management practices to protect turtles, their habitats, feeding and breeding grounds.

It's the kind of work Day's been dreaming of for the 12 years she's been at Taronga and she's thrilled to finally see it coming to life.

"It's taken a long time to obtain the funding, to form the partnerships that we have with national parks, to identify the research gaps, and get trained up to be able to do this work safely," she confesses. 

"It has been quite a lengthy process, but it's definitely been worth it."

Every time her laptop pings with a new piece of data, we're one step closer to taking these turtles off the endangered list and that's worth the effort.

FOLLOW US ON WHATSAPP HERE: Stay across all the latest in celebrity, lifestyle and opinion via our WhatsApp channel. No comments, no algorithm and nobody can see your private details.