Justin Craswell
Tracking endangered leatherback sea turtles by satellite, key habitats identified
http://www.biologynews.net/archives/2014/03/19/tracking_endangered_leatherback_sea_turtles_by_satellite_key_habitats_identified.html
This article talks about how scientists are now able to gather more information about leatherback turtles by satellite tracking. Scientists can now put trackers on these massive turtles and track them using satelliet gps. Doing this, scientists are able to learn more about the turtles preferred habitats, migrating patterns, and their activity. Leatherbacks are endangered and doing this will help organizations protect them, because they will know what areas they can focus on preserving. Most of the previous tracking was on adult females, and now they are putting them on males, to learn more about the whole species. With this work, scientists will be able to find the areas leatherback like the most and be able to protect them, and hopefully help the population grow.
NOS themes-
Role of curiosity- The scientists were curious about the turtles habits, and decided to find a way to learn more about them.
Science is collaborative- Many different organizations were involved in this, but it was led by LPRC.
Importance of repeatability- This could be repeated by another group, and the data was repeated because many turtles went to the same spot.
This article is pretty interesting. It is very important for these scientists to know where these turtles go so they can protect them. I wonder if they can eventually use these tracking devices to track other animals that they could help conserve and protect in the future. Hopefully this causes these sea turtles to be safer in the future. Doing some further research, I found it interesting that people have names the turtles that they are tracking, and they are hoping that these trackers will help them learn more and more about their lives.
ReplyDeleteI found this article that also talks about tracking marine animals for conservation. It shares the technology behind the devices and the variety of devices used to track different kinds of marine life. This article focuses on the migration of tiger sharks off the coast of Florida. It's very interesting to read about the different kinds of marine life that all seem to migrate to the same place. Read more at: http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2014/01/16/back-to-the-future-of-electronic-tagging-marine-animals/
ReplyDeleteI think that satellite tracking will significantly improve the accuracy of identifying animal migration patterns. Before satellite tracking, the only way scientists could follow animal movement was to put tags on animals or to simply follow them. I think that there are a lot of things that could go wrong by just following the animals. Satellite tracking can sometimes show what the animal is doing as well as its exact location. Satellite tracking has been able to determine day to day movements, the size of an animals home range, and the types of habitats that different animals use.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nhptv.org/wild/tracking.asp