It is a question with an answer that has long eluded scientists: where do sea turtles go after they hatch, and before they’re fully grown adults?
People who study sea turtles have long found it nearly impossible to track them in their adolescent years, with that gap in knowledge hindering conservation efforts.
Now, researchers from the University of Central Florida and LGL Ecological Research Associates may finally have some insight on what goes on during the reptiles’ so-called “lost years” between the hatchling stage and adulthood. The findings of the years-long project was published this month in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Nathan Putman, senior scientist at LGL, spoke with Texas Standard about how they tracked the turtles and why it matters for conservation efforts. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Before we talk turtles, tell us a little bit more about LGL Ecological Research Associates. What do you all do?
Nathan Putnam: We are a private marine ecology research company. We’ve got several offices across the U.S. and Canada, and we work a lot with private industries, whether it’s fishing or energy, as well as universities and government agencies.
I see. So you partnered here with University of Central Florida (UCF) on this research. What exactly was your team trying to figure out when it comes to sea turtle behavior in their youth? What specifically were you looking at and for?
Well, you know, this particular paper’s part of a couple of decades worth of work, really, to try to understand sea turtles and the open ocean.
We’ve got a lot of information on where they are on nesting beaches, but how they are distributed, what their abundances are out at sea is pretty poorly known. So what we were aiming for here was to track their movements and to get a better sense of just where they’re occurring out in the Gulf of Mexico.
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Why have they been so hard to track in their adolescence?
Two main problems. One is they’re really small and the other is that they’re growing.
So they’re small, meaning that any of the sort of traditional satellite tracking technology devices that people put on marine animals are just way too big for these little guys.
And then if you can get something on them, they’re growing so quickly, there’s these little scoops on their shells that fluff off as they grow. The devices will pop off pretty quickly.
I see. So how were you finally able to obtain this data?
A little bit of trial and error, working a lot with satellite miniaturization companies who were able to produce finally some small, bird-sized telemetry devices that could get a fix to the shell of the turtles.
And my friend over at the University of Central Florida, Kate Mansfield, came up with a unique solution using a sort of toupee paste/hair extension gel as the right fixative to both sort of waterproof them and have them flexible enough that they would stay on the turtles for a long, long period of time.
