Tracking Turtles
Florida, USA
Key Objective:
Laboratory and field-testing of small-scale solar-paneled satellite tracking tags on post-hatchling sea turtles to increase our understanding of habitat selection and offshore movements.
Why this is important:
Florida’s coast is a rookery for several marine turtle species. It hosts one of the world’s largest nesting assemblages of loggerhead sea turtles as well as significant numbers of nesting green turtles and leatherbacks turtles. Proximity of the sea turtle rookeries to the Gulf Stream current effects environmental conditions in the nests and influences the dispersal options for neonate turtles leaving the beach.
Background
The early life histories of neonate sea turtle species are very poorly known because of technological limits (lack of small-scale tracking technologies capable of remotely recording the animals’ positions days, weeks, or months). Yet, species recovery requires understanding of spatial distributions, potential threats, identification of important nursery habitats, and life stage-specific survival. With our recent success in tracking neonate loggerhead turtles for 1-7 months (Mansfield and Wyneken, in review; Mansfield and Wyneken, in prep) we developed a baseline approach that demonstrated the efficacy of such tracking. This study will develop essential tag attachment methods for green turtle neonates and field-test small-scale, solar-paneled satellite tags on post-hatchling sea turtles. We will establish foundation data sets for future comparisons of dispersal and behavior with wild-caught neonate sea turtles. The tracking results will be disseminated through peer-reviewed publications, posters, websites and presentations.
Aims and Objectives
- Develop and test small-scale telemetry device (satellite tag) attachment methods on green turtles.
- Field-test these tags on tank-reared neonate turtles and, if feasible, wild-caught sea turtles.
- Identify and characterize key post-hatching nursery habitats (including oceanographic features that may influence dispersal), which are largely unknown for green turtles.
- Identify hazards and risks likely encountered by these small sea turtle life stages.
- Communicate our results to the scientific community through peer-reviewed publications, oral and poster presentations, and educational and photographic outreach.
Project leader:
Jeanette Wyneken
Partners:
Florida Atlantic University, NOAA Fisheries, Disney Worldwide Conservation Fund & others
Related threat:
Years funded:
2008 - 2011
A day at the turtle lab
— .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), 02 December, 2011
The challenges we face in developing ways to track young sea turtles offshore (then tracking their travels) are are varied as as the weather. We start with protecting the nests from predators and inclement weather, then collecting the turtles we…
Turtle season
— .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), 20 October, 2011
Even the smallest satellite tags that we use for our neonate sea turtles are too large for hatchlings. So, the neonate green turtles, caught at the nest, grow in our laboratory for several months before we test various ways to…
Saving Sea Turtles
— .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), 13 June, 2011
Saving sea turtles starts with the fundamentals. What are the risks? Where do they occur? What turtles are vulnerable? These sound like simple questions, but they are tough to answer where the turtles spend 99.9% of their lives—in the water,…