The Log | Special Feature

New Grant Will Help Nicholas School Researchers Uncover Migratory Mysteries of Endangered Sea Turtles

An international team of scientists led by Michael Coyne, research scientist at the Nicholas School, has received a $460,990 grant to fund a two-year project to track the migration of endangered Atlantic loggerhead and leatherback turtles.

The grant was awarded to Coyne and his colleagues by the University of New Hampshire Large Pelagic Research Program, which is funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"This grant will allow us to conduct satellite tracking of these endangered turtles on a scale previously not possible," says Coyne, who is a member of the Nicholas School's Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab faculty. "We'll track 20 turtles with satellite tags this year and 30 next year—that's double and triple the number we've been able to tag in past years."

Information gleaned from the satellite tracking will shed new light on mysteries surrounding the species' long-distance migrations and will help biologists and conservationists develop better strategies for managing and protecting the endangered turtles as they crisscross international waters on their annual treks.

To track the animals, Coyne and his associates will attach satellite transmitter tags to the shells of loggerhead turtles at Cape Verde, a group of islands located off the African coast west of Senegal, and to shells of leatherback turtles in the equatorial waters of the Gulf of Guinea, in the west central African nation of Gabon.

Co-investigators on the new grant are Patrick N. Halpin, Gabel Associate Professor of the Practice of Geospatial Analysis at the Nicholas School; Brendan Godley, director of the Marine Turtle Research Group at the University of Exeter; and Michael Fedak of the Sea Mammal Research Unit at the University of St.Andrews.

Earlier this year, the research team published findings from a two-year study that used satellitetracking systems to follow the journeys of 10 turtles from Cape Verde. The study, which was published in May in the journal Current Biology, could turn current conservation strategies upside down, Coyne said, because it contradicts a longheld assumption that loggerhead hatchlings migrate into the open ocean to forage,while adults of the species return closer to shore to hunt for food.

By tracking the turtles for up to two years over ranges that covered more than a half-million square kilometers, the researchers discovered that many of the turtles continued to forage in the deep sea even as smaller, breeding-age adults.

More information about tracking sea turtles is available online at www.seaturtle.org/tracking. The research team's paper in Current Biology is online at here >