 We're counting how many turtles are nesting on beaches in the Gulf of Carpentaria, at islands in the Northern Great Barrier Reef, islands in the Southern Barrier Reef. We're going out into the coastal waters here in Morton Bay, up in Shoalwater Bay, Gladstone Harbour, the reefs in the Northern Barrier Reef, counting the turtles, looking at how they're breeding and growing in their shallow water habitats that they live in. Northern Ireland is really the jewel in the crown for the Great Barrier Reef. It has the biggest concentration of breeding seabirds for the whole of the Barrier Reef, and it has the biggest concentration of breeding green turtles in the world. Understanding the functioning of an island is not just a biological question. We need an input of information from geomorphologists, from the oceanographers, the people who study the seabirds, the turtles. There's a whole range of skills that have got to be brought together. I first visited Rain Island in 1975, and that's the beginning of the scientific monitoring of the population. We next came back to look at the hatchlings in February of 1997. To our horror, we found dead eggs down in the sand, a water table that was flooding eggs. We found to the conclusion that the depth of sand has decreased. The first attempt to make a change to the beach, where the sand was heat up to increase depth, and then over the next couple of years, does it improve the nesting success? Does it improve hatching success? The results are looking promising. So they're now expanding that to a longer length of beach, shifting sand up, making it deeper, progressively testing to make sure we're getting it right.