Florida scientists help solve the mysterious “lost year” of sea turtles in the Gulf

Using satellite trackers, scientists have discovered the place for young sea turtles in an important part of their lives.

“There was a huge data gap between early baby and toddler life stages of sea turtles,” says Kate Mansfield, a marine scientist at the University of Central Florida. “This part of their longevity was largely a mystery.”

For decades, scientists have wondered what happens during the so-called lost years between the small hatching leaving the beach and returning to the nearly grown coastline. Ta.

New research published Tuesday begins to fill that gap.

For more than a decade, Mansfield and colleagues have attached GPS tags to the rapidly growing shells of young wild turtles. Maneuvering a small boat, they search for young turtles drifting among the algae in the Gulf of Mexico, and include the mystery of the endangered green turtle, Loggerhead, Hawksville and Kemp. I tagged the animals.

Katrina Phillips, a marine ecologist at the University of Central Florida and co-author of a new study published in the royal minutes, said that “the outside of young turtle shells grows very rapidly,” and that the GPS was the ultimate goal. The tag will fall out. Society B.

However, each tag remained long enough to send location data for weeks and months. What the researchers found challenged many old ideas.

For a long time, scientists thought that small turtles were passively drifting in the ocean currents, literally drifting along the currents.

“What we’ve revealed is that the turtles are actually swimming,” said Nathan Putman, ecologist at LGL Ecological Research Associates in Texas.

Scientists confirmed this by comparing the location data of young turtles with the route of a drifting buoy set in water simultaneously. More than half of the buoys were washed on land while the turtles were not.

Brian Wallace, a Colorado ecolibrium wildlife ecologist, said:

Additionally, the tracking data showed more variability than scientists expected as small turtles moved between the water and the open oceans of the continental shelf.

In addition to the laborious task of finding a turtle, the trick was to develop flexible solar tags that could stick to shells long enough to send back data.

“For years, this technique has not been able to match the dream,” said Jeffrey Seminoff, a NOAA marine biologist who was not involved in the research.

The findings give biologists a better idea of ​​how young turtles use the Gulf of Mexico, an important region of four endangered sea turtles.

“It’s not that we lost sea turtles, we lost track of them,” said Jeanette Wyneken of Florida Atlantic University.

AP Science Writer Christina Larson