Washington (AP) – Using satellite tracking devices, scientists have discovered the place of youth Marine turtles During a major part of their lives.
“We had huge gaps in data about the stages of children’s lives early in the sea turtles,” said Kate Mansfield, a marine scientist at the University of Central Florida. “This part of their long lives was a large mystery.”
For decades, Scientists have wondered About what is happening during the so -called years lost between Matthew Small Leave the beach and when they return to the coasts, they slept almost – about a year to 10 years.
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The new research published on Tuesday begins filling this gap.
For more than a decade, Mansfield and his colleagues have connected GPS signs on fast -growing shells of small wild turtles. Directing small boats, looked for small turtles that drift between algae in the Gulf of Mexico, ultimately put signs on 114 animals – including endangered green turtles, long -term heads, and Hawksbills and KEMP’s Ridleys.
Catherina Phillips, a marine environment scientist at Central Florida University and co -author of “Katrina Phillips”, a naval environment specialist at Central Florida University and co -author of The Contracting Contens A new study published In the facts of the Royal Society B.
But each sign remained enough to send it a few weeks to a few months of site data. What the researchers found challenged many old ideas.
Scientists have long thought that small turtles were negatively drifted with peripheral currents, with literally flowing.
“What we discovered is that the turtles are already swimming,” said Nathan Botman, co -author, an environment scientist at LGOLOGICAL Associates in Texas.
Scientists emphasized this by comparing the data of the small turtle site with the roads completed in the water at the same time. More than half of the buoys washed on the beach while the turtles did not.
“This little little hatch actually makes his own decisions about the place you want to go in the ocean and what he wants to avoid,” said Brian Wallace, an environmentalist in wildlife in Ecolbrom in Colorado.
The tracking data also showed a greater variation in the locations than scientists expected, as small turtles moved between the continental shelf water and the open ocean.
Besides the strenuous work of finding turtles, the trick was developing solar powered flexible signs that could hang on the shells for a long time to re -send the data.
“For years, technology has not been able to match the dream,” said Jeffrey Siminov, a marine biologist in NOAA who has not participated in the study.
The results give biologists a better idea of how to use small turtles for the Gulf of Mexico, a critical area of four types of endangered sea turtles.
“It is not that marine turtles have ever lost, but we lost their path,” said Janet Winkin of the University of Florida Atlantic, who had no role in the research.
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