Tags can only transmit data if exposed to air, so if a tag was charging and transmitting data, it had to be near the surface, soaking in the sunlight. Mansfield received the data in an email from a satellite relay station. As time passed, the tags transmitted location and temperature data to satellites circling the Earth. The team tagged 17 turtles, and released them into the Gulf Stream off of southeast Florida. The small device is designed to allow room for growth as the turtle matures. These cubes are then stuck to the back of a hatchling turtle using a mixture of silicone used to seal glass in aquariums and the same acrylic you might find in a nail salon. The tags are fairly small-imagine a couple cubes of “party cheese,” as Mansfield puts it. So Mansfield’s team developed a safe method of attaching solar-powered transmitter tags to the backs of baby loggerhead sea turtles. However, tags typically used to monitor wildlife are too large for a baby turtle. To investigate, Kate Mansfield and her colleagues wanted to tag the creatures with some kind of instrument and then use satellites to track them where researchers can’t. ![]() Baby turtles have been spotted amid seaweed beds and floating freely off the coast of North Atlantic islands as far away as the Azores, near Portugal.īut no one’s ever been able to physically track baby turtles to see whether or not these predictions hold any weight. Like a giant lazy river, the gyre would supposedly transport them in a huge circle around the Atlantic. To conserve energy, neonatal sea turtles probably catch a ride on the Gulf Stream to drift with current of the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre. Scientists also think that floating communities in giant mats of seaweed of the genus Sargassum might be a good place for baby turtles. Because they would want to avoid predators like sharks and seabirds, babies likely stay away from the continental shelf, scientists figure. Studying sea turtles, let alone baby ones, on the open water is difficult and expensive, but that hasn’t stopped researchers from coming up with a few different hypotheses of how loggerhead turtles spend their time in the Atlantic. According to their results, published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, baby sea turtles spend these adolescent years traversing long distances, floating in seaweed beds and hanging out at the ocean surface. Mansfield’s team has found a way to fill in the blanks-by tagging and tracking baby turtles via satellite. That's a huge chunk of life history about which sea turtle conservationists haven't a clue. For loggerheads ( Caretta caretta), the lost years phase lasts from 7 to 12 years. “We don’t know where the turtles go, how they get there, how they interact with their environment,” says Kate Mansfield, a marine biologist at the University of Central Florida. ![]() Scientists call this period in a sea turtle's life the “lost years” because they don't have concrete evidence about what happens to them. After hatching in their beach nests, the baby turtles crawl clumsily into the Atlantic Ocean and swim out to sea.īut, what happens after these golf-ball-sized swimmers paddle off into the sunset? The time following their famous beach hatching ritual is a bit of a blur. The first few hours of a loggerhead sea turtle’s life are pretty exciting.
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