Can you track hundreds of miles of the exact route to your favorite place you did five years earlier? Perhaps, you are not sure, but amazingly, the sea turtles are! They can travel hundreds of miles back to their feeding sites after breeding. Not just that! What amazes the most is their retracing power of exactly the same route they used up to five years earlier. This is revealed by a new tracking study.
It is well known that the sea turtles have a strong homing instinct for the sites of their nesting, but these new findings would surely further implications for conserving the sea turtles.
Annette Broderick at the University of Exeter in the UK said,
The extent to which turtles showed fidelity to specific foraging sites and routes was a surprise. Marine turtles migrate hundreds of miles between breeding and foraging grounds, so it is amazing that they are able to return to exactly the same sites via very similar routes.
Using satellite transmitters for tracking 20 female loggerhead- and green turtles nesting at two sites in Cyprus, the researchers found that the turtles find a foraging site at some stage and are surprisingly not just capable of imprinting on it, but also learn how to get back to it.
In making these finding, the researchers have also created news by having recorded the longest ever breath-holding dive for any vertebrate. It lasted for an incredible 10 hours and 12 minutes!