Adult green turtles really like to spend time at the Virgin Islands, and why not? There’s sun, clear water, nesting beaches and seagrass.
Photo: By P.Lindgren – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27611674
We tagged some of the nesting females on Buck Island, a small island off the bigger island of St. Croix. These satellite-tags beamed location data to space and then back to our computers, where we saw that some of these turtles migrated away after nesting – in typical sea turtle fashion – and some stuck around. In fact, 7 of the 10 we tagged stayed in shallow, near-shore waters around St. Croix and Buck Island, while only 3 made long-distance migrations.
This was the first time green turtles from this area (considered a unique management unit) were shown to have this limited migration. It’s important for natural resource managers in the area to know about these movements – or lack thereof – so they can effectively design their management strategies.
So why do some stay and some go? Well, what do you think?
Check out the full article below:
Hart KM, AR Iverson, AM Benscoter, I Fujisaki, MS Cherkiss, C Pollock, I Lundgren, Z Hillis-Starr. 2017. Resident areas and migrations of female green turtles nesting at Buck Island Reef National Monument, St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. Endangered Species Research 32:89-101. doi: 10.3354/esr00793
