Measuring the metabolic of sea turtles is fundamental to understanding their ecology yet the presently available methods are limited. Accelerometry is a relatively new technique for estimating metabolic rate that has shown promise with a number of species but its utility with air-breathing divers is not yet established. The present study undertakes laboratory experiments to investigate whether ...

Juvenile loggerhead and green turtles that inhabit inshore waters of North Carolina, USA undertake long seasonal migrations, after which they often return to specific feeding areas. In addition, juvenile turtles are capable of homing to specific sites after being displaced. As a first step towards investigating the navigational mechanisms that underlie these movements, juvenile turtles were cap...

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...

BACKGROUND The juvenile stage of loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) can last for decades. In the North Pacific Ocean, much is known about their seasonal movements in relation to pelagic habitat, yet understanding their multi-year, basin-scale movements has proven more difficult. Here, we categorize the large-scale movements of 231 turtles satellite tracked from 1997 to 2013 and explore th...

Stable isotope data are useful for inferring foraging and niche variation in marine taxa but can be difficult to interpret, in part because different foraging patterns may result in similar isotopic values. Here, we integrate stable isotope analysis (δ13C and δ15N) with behavioral data to investigate the foraging ecology of loggerhead turtles Caretta caretta on a feeding ground in Shark Bay, We...

mental Contamination and Toxicology 40, 531–536. Plotkin, P., 2003. Adult migrations and habitat use. In: Lutz, P.L., Musick, J.A., Wyneken, J. (Eds.), The Biology of Sea Turtles, vol. 2. CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL, pp. 225–242. Saeki, K., Sakakibara, H., Sakai, H., Kunito, T., Tanabe, S., 2000. Arsenic accumulation in three species of sea turtles. BioMetals 13, 241–250. Sakai, H., Saeki, K., Ic...

Post-hatchling loggerhead turtles (Caretta caretta) in the northern Pacific and northern Atlantic Oceans undertake transoceanic developmental migrations. Similar migratory behaviour is hypothesized in the South Pacific Ocean as post-hatchling loggerhead turtles are observed in Peruvian fisheries, yet no loggerhead rookeries occur along the coast of South America. This hypothesis was supported b...

The objective of this study was to determine reference intervals for plasma protein fractions of normal appearing, wild Atlantic loggerhead sea turtles, Caretta caretta. Blood was collected into heparinized vacutainer tubes from the following groups of turtles: 1) ten adult males; 2) eleven adult females; 3) ten juvenile males; and 4) ten juvenile females. Plasma was removed and total protein c...

Green turtle fibropapillomatosis is a neoplastic disease of increasingly significant threat to the survivability of this species. Degenerate PCR primers that target highly conserved regions of genes encoding herpesvirus DNA polymerases were used to amplify a DNA sequence from fibropapillomas and fibromas from Hawaiian and Florida green turtles. All of the tumors tested (n = 23) were found to ha...

Loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) originating from the Western Atlantic carry out one of the largest marine migrations, reaching the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean Sea. It has been proposed that this transatlantic journey is simply a consequence of drifting, with the lack of a target destination and a passive dispersal with oceanic currents. This predicts that the size of the source ...