A spot in the Atlantic Ocean seems to house baby green turtles as they mature.
After a baby green turtle crawls out of its nest on a moonlit night and makes its way to the surf, it disappears at sea for years until returning to land. Until recently, biologists figured that the turtles drifted on the major currents of the open ocean. But new research, which used satellite tags to track young green turtles for the first time, suggests that the middle of those swirling currents acts as a previously unknown turtle nursery.
The big challenge is attaching solar-powered trackers to young turtles with six-inch-long shells. “At that age, the bony plates of their shell, similar to the bony plates of baby skulls, haven’t fully fused together,” Mansfield says. If the researchers attached the trackers with a tough epoxy, they would end up deforming the turtles as they grew.]
When the researchers were finally able to watch their cohort of 21 tagged turtles swim, they found that while many of them spent some time riding the Gulf Stream north, 14 of the 21 ended up swimming into the Sargasso Sea. “We call it the golden floating rainforest of the Atlantic,” says Tess Mackey, program manager for the Sargasso Sea Commission, a nonbinding conservation collaboration between 10 countries bordering the waterway. “If you look at a photo of a sargassum mat, it’s like a scavenger hunt, seeing the small crabs and shrimp and fish that are living in there.
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