Sea Turtle Selfies

Life isn’t always better down where it’s wetter: Sea turtles occupy that unfortunate intersection between endangered and hard to study. But thanks to ecologists, we landlubbers have a glimpse into what life—and more importantly, lunch!—looks like to a leatherback sea turtle.

The team outfitted 24 leatherbacks with GPS trackers and shell-mounted cameras to track their foraging behavior off the coast of Nova Scotia. One of the researchers likens it to watching the “turtles’ home videos”—except home for this species is almost the whole ocean. Leatherbacks are highly migratory reptiles, sometimes traveling 10,000 miles or more in a single year, so identifying important feeding and breeding grounds is crucial to ensuring these not-so-gentle giants (to jellyfish anyway) keep swimming the seven seas.  

Wallace et al/Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution

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