A Growth Curve for Green Sea Turtles, Chelonia mydas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, 1913-14
Frazer N and Ladner R. 1986. A Growth Curve for Green Sea Turtles, Chelonia mydas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, 1913-14. Copeia. 1986(3):798-802
Due to the paucity of information on growth rates in natural populations of green turtles, virtually any measurements arising from the capture and recapture of wild specimens are of value to conservationists and demographers. ln this paper we construct a growth curve for Chelonia using information gathered by Schmidt (1916) in his study of the movements of juvenile green turtles in waters around the U.S. Virgin Islands (then the Danish West Indies) in 1913-14. Fabens (1965) provided a method for rearranging the von Bertalanffy equation to allow fitting of data from animals of unknown age to estimate growth curves. The method requires measurements at capture and recapture and the time interval between measurements. It has been used previously to provide growth curves for both Chelonia and Caretta in Florida waters (Frazer and Ehrhart, 1985).
- Type
- Journal Article
- Authors
- Frazer, Nat; Ladner, Rosamund
- Units
- SFCN , VICR , VIIS
- Keywords
- Age, Measurements, Model, Physical, Physiology, Size