Scientists from the University of Florida have found a way to map out the "lost years" of a turtle, a period in their lives which happens in between hatching and becoming an adult turtle.
Researchers have already documented how turtles hatch from their eggs up until they reach the sea; however, little is known about their activities until they return as adult turtles. "We don't know where the turtles go, how they get there, how they interact with their environment," marine biologist from University of Florida, Kate Mansfield told Smithsonian Mag.
The subject of Mansfield's research is the loggerhead sea turtles and for them, lost years of this species could amount to seven to 12 years. To find out the events happening to them during this so called "lost years," the researchers tagged the baby turtles and monitor their movements through satellite. They attached solar-powered transmitters to 17 turtles then set them free on the Gulf Stream.
As the turtles travel, the tags relay information including temperature and the turtles' current location. The tags can only send data when exposed to air, so in order to transmit data, the tag has to be in the surface of the waters and it must also have access to sunlight. Data from these tags are relayed to Mansfield through email.
The results showed that after hatching, baby turtles generally live for a while on seaweed beds, travel for long distances, and surface on shallower waters for food. Aside from these conclusions, Mansfield and her team also hypothesized that baby turtles avoid continental shelf for these are full of predators and to conserve energy, young turtles let themselves to be drifted away by the current going to the North Atlantic Subtropical Gyre.
Studying how marine species behave in the open waters has always been challenging due to their ever constant movement and the influences of factors such as waves and temperature. However, Mansfield's method is the first non-evasive method used to study the behavior of a marine species.
This study was published in the March 5 issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
