NOAA research confirms young turtles don’t drift with Ocean Current

When scientists compared buoy tracks with those of turtles, they came to know that turtles were not swimming with them, but separately. When they again noticed turtles movements after a couple of days, they came to know that the placement of turtles was varied from the ordinary one by as much as 125 miles.

As per the reports, this behavior of scientists shows their attitude to move towards a beneficial point as and when required.

The Ongoing Research:                 

A large number of research studies have taken place in this field stating that turtles keep changing their behavior according to the environment. In the series of studies on this subject, a study was conducted by National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Central Florida.

According to this study, Turtles are excellent swimmers right from the beginning. They start swimming from an early age of 6-18 months, which helps them in the future. As per this study, young turtles don’t drift with current in any situation.

Dr. Kate Mansfield of Marine Turtle Research Group of the University of Central Florida and Pitman have put solar energy tags some time back on 44 turtles. Apart from this, 20 Kemp’s sea turtles and 24 eco-friendly turtles were also captured by the scientists in Gulf of Mexico. They tracked those turtles for a period of 2-3 months before the tags came off.

Earlier, scientists used to think that young sea turtles would remain under cover in the ocean before they become big enough to reproduce and survive on their own. During this entire duration, they would drift with the current in the ocean until their swimming skills improved.

But the recent studies have eliminated all the doubts and clarified that young turtles are good in swimming right from the beginning and don’t drift with ocean’s current.