Autonomous and independent, leave the beach and disappear. The mystery of the “lost years” of the long lives of sea turtles, resolved with the help of the sun.
Are known as “Lost years” of the long lives of sea turtles. They disappear when they leave the beach and come back almost adults, sometimes 10 years later.
The phenomenon happens around the world, including us Azoreswho receive many young cabeçuded turtles from the beaches of the Southeast United States. Now the motivation of young turtles may have been discovered.
Scientists have noticed the phenomenon for decades. “We have huge data gaps on the first phases of the life of sea turtles, from babies to children,” he said Kate Mansfieldfrom the University of Florida Central, quoted by the agency: “This part of its long lives has been largely a mystery“.
Label Satellite GPSstuck to young turtles, the Marine Scientist and her team have helped in the last decade to try to solve this puzzle.
The team placed GPS labels in the carapaces of 114 sea turtles of various green turtle species, the common turtle (or cabeçuda turtle), the pipe turtle and the kin turtle (or a small-turtle)-in the Gulf of Mexico, to accompany its movement, details a study on February 5 on February on Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Earlier, scientists believed that newborn turtles were limited to sailing passively with ocean currents. But the new data collected by the Mansfield team suggest that these young women They actively swim and make decisions about your movement.
Their routes were often different from the trajectories of oceanic buoys placed strategically in water while turtles, and which should follow the same currents. More than half of the buoys ended up to the coast, while turtles, owned themselves, continued their trips.
They “are really swimming” and “deciding where they want to go to the ocean,” explain ecologists Nathan Putman and Bryan Wallace. In addition, these young women are Much more mobile than you thought: They swim between the waters of the continental shelf and the open ocean.
“They seem to be choosing places in the north of the Gulf of Mexico where there is favorable food, favorable growth conditions and minimize the chances of faces predators. They seem to be balancing all these things at the same time, ”said scientist Nathan Putman in Texas Standard,
To finally unravel the mystery, the scientists had a powerful ally: the Sol.
Earlier, the GPS labels were detached from the turtles’ carapaces as they grew, which happened before the investigators of obtaining concrete answers. “The outer part of the young turtle carapace is detached as they grow very quickly,” explains Katrina Phillips, co-author of the study.
This time, the team developed Flexible labels fed by solar energywhich were trapped in the carapaces enough to send valuable location data.
One of the main things we are doing with this information is to build models that help us to predict where the turtles are located and how many of them are there, ”explained Putman,“ and what we want to do with this information is to better understand what are the risks of various activities, whether they are fishing or energy development, and overlap them to the places where people also interact with the ocean, so that we can guide the fishing industry sustainable activities that allow the coexistence of fishing and these turtles generally productively. ”
Tomás Guimarães, Zap //
