TSA Training Scholarship Program

Posted on: Sunday, June 8th, 2008

TSA’s first Training Scholarship Program is underway.

On June 3 two very tired and weary travelers from Myanmar (formerly Burma) arrived at Baltimore Washington airport, after a long flight from Yangon to New York. Myo Myo (a female) and Kyaw Moe (male) are the first students to participate in the TSA’s Training Scholarship Program. Both are employed by WCS’s Myanmar Turtle Conservation Program which receives support and funding from the TSA. The WCS/TSA Turtle Team is an active and hard working group, focusing their efforts primarily on conservation and research of the critically endangered Burmese roofed turtle, Batagur (Kakchuga) trivittata. Other priorities are breeding programs for Myanmar endemic species including Burmese star tortoise and the Arakan forest turtles, and handling confiscations of priority species such as Asian mountain tortoises. Kyaw Moe is stationed primarily on the remote upper Chindwin River working on the roofed turtle recovery project, while Myo Myo is based in WCS’s Yangon office and handles multiple responsibilities. She has received several grants to survey for new wild populations of B. trivittata in recent years, and participated in TSA’s second chelonian husbandry training workshop in Hong Kong in 2005.

Myo Myo and Kyaw Moe will be in the U.S. for the entire Summer, wrapping up at the TSA annual conference in Tucson in September. The core of their training experience will be two months under Dr Willem Roosenberg, starting at the Patuxent River Diamondback Terrapin Project and then spending time at other sites in Maryland and Ohio. They will undergo a rigorous training program designed to make them better turtle research biologists with the ability and confidence to study turtles in their home country. They will learn basic survey skills to study turtles in three different systems as well as radio telemetry, blood sampling, tissue sampling, and database management. Then beginning in August they will spend two weeks with Dr. Peter Pritchard at the Chelonian Research Institute in Oviedo Florida, then on to Ray Ashtonís for gopher tortoise experience. Other opportunities in Florida, New York and possibly California will complete their format training, which will conclude at the TSA conference in Tucson in September.