NEW YORK: New research said that female sea turtles use Earth’s magnetic field to travel thousands of miles to the beach where they were born.
Female sea turtles have a reputation for returning to the same beach where they were born to lay their own eggs. The ability to return home even from thousands of miles distant has been a mystery to some, especially since these turtles leave these shores as tiny hatchlings and don’t return until they’re fully matured. However, new evidence has emerged that these sea turtles are navigating by way of magnetism.
Loggerhead turtles, a species of sea turtle that has already demonstrated the ability to use magnetic fields for navigation in the open ocean, were used in the study. However, it seems as if that the same ability they use to traverse the open seas may be in use when it comes time to return to familiar shores to lay batches of eggs.
Scientists involved in the study took close look at the subtle shifts in the Earth’s own magnetic fields and cross-referenced them against records taken of sea turtle nesting sites. When they did so, a connection emerged; in some cases the turtles nested closer together on a short patch of coastline when the Earth’ magnetic field shifted in such a way that the so-called “magnetic signatures” of beach-front egg laying property moved closer to one another. In regions where the opposite was true – where these magnetic signatures spread apart instead of converged – the sea turtles spread across stretches of beach that were farther apart from one another instead.
According to study co-author and biology graduate student J. Roger Brothers from the University of North Carolina, he and the rest of the research team found it fascinating how the loggerhead sea turtles could navigate their way across vast expanses of featureless open ocean, guided only by the magnetic compass in their heads, to come back to a beach they had possibly only seen once in their lives with unerring accuracy.
