Washington (AP) -Using satellite trackers, scientists have found a young sea turtle in an important part of life.
“There was a large data gap on the life stage of the infant from the early babies of the sea turtle,” said Kate Monthfield, a marine scientist at Central Florida University. “This part of their long life was mainly a mystery.”
For decades, scientists are wondering what will happen in the so -called lost year when a small hatch leaves the beach and returns to the almost growing coastline. Ta.
The new research released on Tuesday begins to fill the gap.
For over 10 years, Mansfield and colleagues have attached GPS tags to a rapid growing shell of young wild turtles. Piloting a small boat, they searched for young turtles drifting among the algae in Mexico, and eventually contained the mystery of green turtles, logger heads, Hawksville, and Kemp I tagged the animal.
Catholina Philips, a co -author of a new research in the Royal Family’s minutes, is finally GPS because “the outside of the young turtle shell grows very rapidly”. The tag will drop. Social B.
However, each tag remained enough to send location data for several weeks and months. What researchers found tried many old ideas.
For a long time, scientists thought that small turtles drifted passively on the sea current and literally drifting along the flow.
“We have revealed that the turtles are actually swimming,” said Nathan Putman, an ecologist of Texas’s LGL Ecological Research Associates.
Scientists have confirmed this by comparing the route of drifting buoys set in water at the same time as the position data of young turtles. While the turtle was not so, more than half of the buoy was washed on land.
Brian Wallace, Colorado’s Ecolivrium, Brian Wallace,:
In addition, the tracking data showed more variable than scientists expected, as small turtles moved between the water and the ocean on the continental shelf.
In addition to the broken work of finding a turtle, the trick was to develop a flexible solar tag that could stick to a shell that was enough to send data back.
“For many years, this technology could not match my dream,” said Jeffrey Seminov, a NOAA marine biologist who was not involved in research.
The survey results gives biologists a better idea of how young turtles use the Mexico Bay, an important area of four types of sea turtles, an extinct ED species.
“It doesn’t mean that the sea turtle has been lost, we have lost its tracking,” said Jeanette Wyneken of Florida Atlantic University.
