submitted to the 25 Symposium on Sea Turtle Biology and Conservation. Night-time spectral sensitivity of adult female leatherback sea turtles Levenson, D.H., Eckert, S.A. Crognale, M.A., Duhamel, P., Kubis, S.A. and Harms, C.A. Flicker electroretinography (ERG) was used to measure the spectral sensitivity of adult female leatherback sea turtles in vivo on a nesting beach on the southern Caribbe...

We documented the presence of fibropapillomatosis (FP), a debilitating tumor-forming disease, in marine turtles in Espirito Santo Bay (Brazil) from March 2007 to April 2008, and assessed the value of a specific environmental index for predicting the prevalence of FP. Turtles were captured monthly with entanglement nets and scored for presence and severity of FP. For the assessment of habitat qu...

1. Linking phenotype, performance and fitness has proven difficult to document despite the tremendous influence of this concept on microevolutionary research. One of the major issues involves identifying the target of selection when phenotype and performance are correlated. 2. In a replicated manipulative field experiment, we evaluated this model by testing the hypothesis that predation on hatc...

In response to seasonality and spatial segregation of resources, sea turtles undertake long journeys between their nesting sites and foraging grounds. While satellite tracking has made it possible to outline their migration routes, we still have little knowledge of how they select their foraging grounds and adapt their migration to dynamic environmental conditions. Here, we analyzed the traject...

Understanding the phylogenetic position of crown turtles (Testudines) among amniotes has been a source of particular contention. Recent morphological analyses suggest that turtles are sister to all other reptiles, whereas the vast majority of gene sequence analyses support turtles as being inside Diapsida, and usually as sister to crown Archosauria (birds and crocodilians). Previously, a study ...

We examined the gross and microscopic pathology and distribution of sea turtles that were landed as bycatch from the Hawaii, USA-based pelagic longline fishery and known to be forced submerged. Olive ridley turtles (Lepidochelys olivacea) composed the majority of animals examined, and hook-induced perforation of the esophagus was the most common gross lesion followed by perforation of oral stru...

Young loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) from the east coast of Florida, USA, undertake a transoceanic migration around the North Atlantic Gyre, the circular current system that flows around the Sargasso Sea. Previous experiments indicated that loggerhead hatchlings, when exposed to magnetic fields replicating those that exist at five widely separated locations along the migratory pathway...

From 1995 to 2006, US federal fisheries observers deployed aboard commercial fishing vessels in the US mid-Atlantic region documented captures of loggerhead Caretta caretta, green Chelonia mydas, Kemp’s ridley Lepidochelys kempii, and leatherback Dermochelys coriacea turtles in commercial sink gillnet gear. Data collected by these observers were used to characterize sea turtle bycatch in sink g...

Turtles are one of Earth's most instantly recognizable life forms, distinguished for over 200 million years in the fossil record. Even so, key nodes in the phylogeny of turtles remain uncertain. To address this issue, we sequenced >90% of the nuclear recombination activase gene 1 (RAG-1) for 24 species representing all modern turtle families. RAG-1 exhibited negligible saturation and base compo...

Systemic vascular resistance (R(sys)) of freshwater turtles increases substantially during anoxia, but the underlying mechanisms are not fully understood. We investigated whether hydrogen sulfide (H(2)S), an endogenously produced metabolite believed to be an O(2) sensor/transducer of vasomotor tone, contributes to the increased R(sys) of anoxic red-eared slider turtles (Trachemys scripta). Vasc...