Herps in the News: Leatherback Turtle Migration Study

 

 

The main subject of this article was the migration patterns used by the leatherback sea turtle, Dermochelys coriacea, identifying potential danger zones in their paths.

The leatherback turtle is the world's largest sea turtle, as well as one of the most critically endangered species. Using this very large turtles patterns of migration allows for a new understanding of the most used areas of the Pacific Ocean by this turtle. This allows for an adjustment in fishing practices, hopefully reducing new deaths of this unique species.

These turtles are the widest-ranging marine turtle species and can migrate across the entire ocean, if necessary. This can increase the likeliness that they are caught in fishing gear, especially on the way to or from their foraging grounds to nesting beaches. This interaction with a number of fisheries is believed to be one of the leading causes of death, particularly in the Pacific Ocean, where the survival number of the leatherback turtle has dropped by more than 90% since 1980. These "hot spots" are being assessed to determine if limiting fishing at particular times of year may be effective for the protection of these large, wonderful creatures.

Overall, they found that of the two populations of leatherback turtles that nest either in the Eastern or Western Pacific, both were almost equally at risk of a negative human interaction, mainly fishing gear, because of the wide distributions of one populations and the very small distribution of the other that can cause them to have major changes in their migrations due to food concentrations.

I did my class powerpoint lecture on Sea Turtle Migration and this article was extremely interesting to me to read. While doing my lecture I found that finding information on the Leatherback Sea Turtles migration habits was very hard to come by. They have a very large (obviously since they can get up to 6 feet in length), soft carapace that can make it difficult to attach a satellite transmitter to, which is how they track the migration routes. It was interesting to learn why these turtles are extremely endangered, due to these said "hot spots" that they travel the most putting them more at risk of interacting with fishing gear from humans. Hopefully something will be done to fix this problem and allow for these turtles to regrow their population, as they are long-lived animals, but they take a long time to reach maturity.


References:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120301103754.htm#.T3UVzJw_FOU.mailto