MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Sea turtles famously lay their eggs in nests on sandy beaches. And then a couple of months later, droves of tiny turtle hatchlings emerge from eggs that look a little bit like ping-pong balls, and they scurry to the sea. Well, what happens next in the turtles' lives - the juvenile years - that has been a bit more of a mystery. In fact, scientists call it the lost years. So researchers set out to catch baby turtles in the Gulf of Mexico. They wanted to tag them and learn more about where they go. You can hear the scientists pulling up to a patch of seaweed here. This is right before snagging a baby turtle.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Just get it. Woo.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Nice.
(APPLAUSE)
KELLY: Kate Mansfield of the University of Central Florida was there on that boat. She joins us now. Hi, Kate.
KATE MANSFIELD: Hello.
KELLY: Hi. So it sounds fun. But also, I know it took a long time. Your team spent a decade catching these turtles and tagging them and then releasing them?
MANSFIELD: We did. It started with the BP oil spill in 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. And I happened to be at the right place at the right time working for a federal agency and had just figured out how to tag these little guys when we were asked to try to figure out what was going on with the little baby turtles in the Gulf of Mexico relative to the oil spill.
KELLY: And how does one go about attaching a tag to these little guys?
MANSFIELD: It took us a while. We enlisted the help of a manicurist who...
KELLY: (Laughter) I love it.
MANSFIELD: ...Recommended an acrylic base coat to the turtle shell because it's the same thing as our fingernails, keratin, and that helped seal the shell. And we came up with a couple methods for four different species of turtles that we caught offshore in the Gulf of Mexico.
KELLY: And just to describe - I was looking at pictures of what your team was doing. It is a mound of - I didn't know it was, like, nail glue - but a mound on the little guy's back and then looks like the size of a 9-volt battery with an antenna sticking up. That's what you're trying to mount on there?
MANSFIELD: Yes. Yeah, the tags are about the size of my thumb. And we also use silicone or marine epoxy that's flexible, and it allows the turtles to grow a little bit and the tags to stay on for upwards of three to six months, while we can...
KELLY: Because this is another problem, right? Just like our fingernails, their turtle shells are growing and shedding, and so they can just slough the whole thing off?
MANSFIELD: Exactly. Yeah. But that's a good thing. We can get a little bit of information about where they're going and what they're doing while also not harming the turtle.
KELLY: So you manage to tag them. You release them. What happened next? What did you learn about where they were going and why?
MANSFIELD: That's what's really intriguing because one of the long-held assumptions about this life stage is that they're passive little drifters. And what we found was that these turtles are not passive little drifters all of the time. And they're occurring in shelf waters, in particular in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico on the West Florida Shelf, where turtles shouldn't necessarily be based on our long-held assumptions.
KELLY: OK. So they're not just drifting around with the currents. In some cases, you're finding they're actually swimming and in places you wouldn't have expected. Why does this matter? I mean, just explain to a nonscientist, why does it matter where a baby turtle goes or whether it's drifting or swimming?
MANSFIELD: I would say that we know very little about certain times and aspects of a sea turtle life. And if you're trying to protect a species or recover a species - like all of the sea turtles that are in U.S. waters - we want to know everything we can at every single life stage. And if we're missing information during critical foundational periods of their lives, such as the toddler years, then we're not necessarily doing what we can and understanding what we can to best protect them. And, you know, sea turtles are a good way for us to keep tabs on the health of the ocean as well.
KELLY: Kate Mansfield, from the University of Central Florida, talking about her study on sea turtles - baby sea turtles. It was published this month by the Royal Society. Thank you, Kate.
MANSFIELD: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
