NATIONAL POST (Toronto, Ontario) 02 May 06 Reptile's 8,000-km search for food (Tom Peterkin, The Daily Telegraph)
Belfast: An astonishing 8,000-kilometre journey by the first giant turtle to be caught and tagged off the British Isles has excited scientists studying the endangered creatures.
For eight months, marine biologists have been tracking a 410-kilogram leatherback sea turtle that was caught off southwest Ireland last summer.
People in the popular resort of Dingle were enthralled when the huge reptile was rescued by scientists and a team from the local Oceanworld aquarium after becoming entangled in lobster pots. Her capture presented a unique opportunity for biologists hoping to learn more about the little understood feeding and mating habits of the largest member of the turtle family.
Experts from University College Cork and the University of Wales, Swansea, fitted a satellite tracking device to the turtle before she was returned to the Atlantic. That has enabled them to follow a remarkable oceanic odyssey in which the Dingle turtle has so far swum 8,000 kilometres to the Cape Verde Islands, off West Africa.
Leatherback turtles have been tagged in Nova Scotia and followed to their mating beaches in the Caribbean. But this is the first time one has been tracked from the northeastern Atlantic, and the information gathered could help conservationists to save the species from extinction.
In 1980 there were about 115,000 adult females, but now there are fewer than 25,000 worldwide. The most pessimistic forecast suggests they may be extinct in the Pacific in 50 years.
From Ireland, the Dingle turtle swam along the French coast and last October was heading toward the Bay of Biscay before turning round in pursuit of jellyfish.
She then spent a week zigzagging off northwest Spain, suggesting she found a rich supply of food there. The next month she headed toward Madeira and the Canary Islands. By early December she was 200 kilometres off the Western Sahara.
In the New Year, she was off Senegal, where a dive in search for food took her to a depth of more than 500 metres. Then, for almost three months, signals from the battery-operated tracking device stopped. Researchers feared the technology had succumbed to the varying sea temperatures or the great pressures exerted during dives.
But just when it was thought she had been lost forever, they received another signal showing she was heading north.
Her change of direction suggests she will not mate this year and is perhaps returning to Ireland in search of food instead of to nesting beaches in West Africa, South America or the Caribbean.
"I hope she comes back to Dingle, which will allow us to go out in a boat and see how and where she is feeding," says Tom Doyle, a marine biologist at University College Cork.