The Cold Blooded News

The Newsletter of the Colorado Herpetological Society

Volume 28, Number 1; January, 2001

Turtles Start an Epic Swim

by Marisa Taylor

Reprinted from Voice of the Turtle, the newsletter of the San Diego Turtle and Tortoise Society, Vol.29, No.11, November 2000.
From The San Diego Union-Tribune, Oct. 2, 2000.

Bubba, a loggerhead sea turtle, got his first chance yesterday to return home after living in a tank for 35 years.

Bubba and two other loggerheads were released five miles off San Diego by scientists who plan to track the turtles' journey to Japan.

"This is the first time in decades that they can't see the bottom," said Scott Eckert, a senior research biologist with Hubbs-Sea World Research Institute.

By gluing transmitters to the turtles' shells, scientists hope to determine whether the turtles choose a path based on the temperature of the ocean. It would help explain how the turtles are able to navigate the 6,000-mile route, Eckert said.

Loggerheads hatch on nesting beaches in Japan. When only a few inches long, they swim across the Pacific to North America, where they remain for several years before returning to Japan.

In 1998, Hubbs-Sea World researchers released two turtles, which headed straight for Japan but stopped off the coast of Hawaii. Eventually, the batteries in their transmitters wend dead.

The following year, two turtles were released. One headed to Japan, but for reasons unknown to scientists, the other went south to Mexico.

Yesterday, the researchers attached transmitters equipped with longer-lasting batteries.

The transmitters are activated every time the turtles surface. Scientists guess they will pick up the group about three times a day.

The turtles are expected to reach Japan in about a year, and the transmitters will fall off as their shells grow, Eckert said.

The turtles face some dangers on the trip, including being caught in commercial fishing nets, said Harve Kaufmann, director of development for Hubbs-Sea World. The turtles also risk falling prey to sharks and killer whales, their natural predators.

But Nicole Stray, one of a group of Pacific Beach Middle School students who are studying the turtles, predicted the three would find their way home. Stray and other students from the school's science program plan to follow the turtles on a Web site designed to track the trip.

Stray said she liked witnessing the event instead of just hearing about it in school.

"When they swam out into the water, they looked like they were waving," she said.

The turtles' progress can be tracked on the Internet at <http://www.hswri.org>.