Dancing Baby Sea Turtles Help Researchers Unravel the Mysteries of Their Navigational Superpowers
Dancing Baby Sea Turtles Help Researchers Unravel the Mysteries of Their Navigational Superpowers
Loggerhead turtles can identify specific magnetic signatures, according to a new study, hinting at how the aquatic reptiles manage to return to the same foraging and nesting sites over and over again
In captivity, baby loggerhead turtles do a little dance when they know food is coming. Ken Lohmann / University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Sea turtle migrations are impressive: These aquatic reptiles swim thousands of miles across the open ocean to return to the same foraging grounds and nesting sites. They don’t always take the shortest, most direct route, but they do eventually get to where they’re going.
Now, a new study is offering more insights into this advantageous behavior. Baby loggerhead turtles can identify specific magnetic signatures, according to a new paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
“It is amazing that sea turtles have access to a wealth of invisible information that they use to navigate in ways that are hard for us to even imagine,” says study co-author Catherine Lohmann, a zoologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, to Cosmos magazine’s Imma Perfetto.
More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dancing-baby-sea-turtles-help-researchers-unravel-the-mysteries-of-their-navigational-superpowers-180986060/
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I learned a lot about them by reading a fiction series by Mary Alice Monroe. The first one is The Beach House & these books are all about the Turtle Ladies who walk the beaches to look for signs a female has come ashore, then mark off an area to protect eggs. Of course they form a welcoming committee to form human guardrails to ensure they make it into the ocean as the newly hatched can get easily confused. What a cool thing to do!
Ty for sharing!