NEW YORK: The sea turtles’ long years of quest as they disappear for decades had bewildered scientists.
They start as early as 1 when these little baby turtles called “yearlings” instinctively head to a journey in the wide open sea while they just completely vanish for years. Researchers now are able to track them with the solar-powered tracking device. This enabled them to follow 44 turtles while they are at the point of choosing specific directions which was never expected since they were believed to just drift submissively with the current.
This had opted Katherine Mansfield, the lead author and head of the turtle research group of the University of Central Florida, to do some tests and be able to determine the truth on what is believed as a “passive migration” among turtles during a certain stage. A collection of young turtles from ages six months and two years is needed to complete a test, yet turtles during that stage are difficult to find that Dr. Mansfield and her team would reach 60 miles and couldn’t find a trace of one turtle.
Eventually, after a long difficult activity of collecting the samples, Mansfield and Nathan Putman, a co-author was rewarded with a sufficient sample size for the test. They tagged 20 Kemp’s ridley turtles and 24 green turtles. Each was attached with a solar-power tracking device with a floating buoy that floats along acting as “drifters” as they are tagged and tracked.
