Margaret's got the scoop on some scientific sea turtle discoveries from this summer! Researchers in Australia captured amazing drone footage of 60,000 turtles heading to their rookery to lay eggs, while folks in Boston studied the stress of returning the reptiles to the wild.
Class Discussion Questions:
1) Create a poster to be hung near a rookery warning people to be careful of baby turtles or eggs.
2) What can be done by humans to help protect sea turtles?
Read the Script:
[Margaret] Anyone else like going to the beach? Besides soaking in the sea and sand you can observe a whole range of wildlife not just the seagulls that like to steal your potato chips.
If you're at the right beach at the right time you might be lucky enough to see something like this. Super cool right? That's about 64,000 green turtles swimming off the edge of Australia's Great Barrier Reef they're on their way to lay eggs on the shore.
Scientists from the Queensland government's Department of Environment and Science captured the footage using a drone at the world's largest green turtle rookery at Raine Island. A rookery is a netting location of a population of turtles.
Green turtles are found mostly in tropical and subtropical waters, after hatching they head to sea to visit feeding grounds where they feast on underwater vegetation. These guys are herbivores that means they don't eat other animals.
Then when they mature and are ready to lay to their own eggs they return back to the very beach where they hatched, sometimes they'll even travel across an ocean to do so. Guess there's place like home to start a new family. Green turtles can grow up to 47 inches long and weigh up to 400 pounds according to the World Wildlife Fund.
But these big are endangered due to hunting, overharvesting off their eggs, loss of beach nesting grounds and getting caught in fishing gear.
More endangered sea turtles are the topic of this next bit of news. According to the experts, loggerhead and Kemp's ridley sea turtles get kinda stressed out when being transported to release locations in the Southern United States.
Scientists at the New England Aquarium in Boston published a study with the findings in the journal "Integrated Organismal Biology" in May, 2020. Their aquarium takes in dozens of turtles each year to treat them for various ailments.
Remember I said that sea turtles like warm waters. Well, every year between November and January, the waters off Boston get chilly. Any turtles that didn't head to tropical waters fast enough can become stunned by the cold waters.
They need help to recover from the shock and from not being able to feed. That's where the New England Aquarium steps in to nurture the turtles back to health. When the reptiles are ready to return to the wild, they need to be transported South to warm waters.
During these trips, scientists took note of how the turtles responded and took blood tests of the animals. They noted the differences in trips that took less than six hours, about 12 hours, 18 hours and 24 hours.
Researchers found the longer the trip, the more stress turtles appear to have. However, all the turtles were in good health even if the trip was 24 hours long, which is a plus. What the scientists suggest is trying to keep the return trip as short as possible, so the animals can hit the water as stress-free as possible.
Okay, that's enough turtle talk for me but next time I head to the beach, I'll definitely be checking for those cuties.