In late October, a collaborative team of researchers from Two Oceans Aquarium Foundation and Upwell took a boat into the swift Agulhas Current, the southwest boundary current of the Indian Ocean that runs down the east coast of South Africa. There, they released 12 tiny loggerhead turtles with satellite tags attached to their carapace (top shells) in an effort to understand how these turtles are using this oceanic highway. See where these turtles have traveled over their first weeks in the ocean!
Nuno Vasco Rodrigues is a Marine Biologist and researcher at MARE IPLeiria. He was named “Conservation Photographer of the Year” by Ocean Geographic Society in 2021. For the past three years, Nuno has photographed Upwell’s work tagging juvenile loggerhead turtles in the Azores Archipelago in partnership with the COSTA Project and the University of the Azores, which is part of Upwell’s Lost Years Initiative. Nuno took some time to chat with us about the highlights and challenges of documenting sea turtle releases underwater.
With a team of collaborators, we tested new specially-designed prototypes of Lotek microsatellite tags on 160 juvenile sea turtles of four species in the North Atlantic. The data from these tags was published in a new article, "Novel Microsatellite Tags Hold Promise for Illuminating the Lost Years in Four Sea Turtle Species." We sat down with lead-author Tony Candela to talk about this article, his process as lead-author, and the important implications of these findings for the bio-logging community.
When fishermen and researchers collaborate, they create opportunities to amplify efforts for the research and conservation of sea turtles. This past spring, Upwell participated in these efforts by providing a satellite tag for Liam Neythan, a leatherback sea turtle that was saved in Sinaloa, Mexico. Our collaborators, the fishers Edmundo Rafael Garcías Burgos and Mariano García Olivas, as well as Dr. Alan Zavala Norzagaray and the CIIDIR IPN Unidad Sinaloa are the key collaborators and heroes in this story.
At the beginning of June, Upwell Executive Director George Shillinger traveled to Juno and Jupiter beaches in Florida to catch the end of the leatherback nesting season monitoring conducted at Loggerhead Marinelife Center (LMC) and participate in ongoing collaborative research projects. Read more about those projects and meet some of the leatherbacks that were monitored this season!
New technologies are finally shedding light on one of the greatest mysteries in sea turtle biology. Using prototype “micro-satellite” tags specifically designed to fit juvenile leatherback turtles, Upwell and Florida Atlantic University researchers released eighteen captive reared juvenile leatherbacks to track their movements off the coast of Florida and shed light on the “lost years” phase of their lives.
